


shades of cool

by tagteamme



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Awkward Flirting, Everyone Is Alive, Fake Parenting, Fluff, Humor, Including both of Keith's parents, Landscaper Keith, M/M, Meddling Family, Mentions of Other Voltron Paladins, Misunderstandings, Romance, Romelle is Keith's cousin, Teacher Shiro (Voltron), This fic has massive dork behaviour, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, don't let the title fool you, thirst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-13
Updated: 2019-03-18
Packaged: 2019-10-09 16:23:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17410229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tagteamme/pseuds/tagteamme
Summary: Pretending to be Romelle's father, Keith storms into a parent-teacher interview with all the righteous fury the situation calls for and ends up running into the most handsome man he's ever seen.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I've been writing this fic as a stress-reliever so buckle in boys, it's going to get Hallmark levels of corny

There’s a lot of things Keith is willing to do for his baby cousin. He’s been around her since she was born, and now that she’s moved into his town for the year while her father is overseas, he’s taken up quite the protective mantle for her. She’s got a bubbly personality but it’s hard for kids to move and adjust to new places, especially if they do it in the middle of the first month of the tenth grade. Thankfully Romelle has adjusted well to her new school for the most part. There’s still a few hiccups though, but Keith’s ready to do anything for her.

Including pretending to be her father, despite the fact that she’s only eight years younger than him. It’s parent-teacher interview day, and Romelle hadn’t told his father or mother. She had instead knocked hesitantly on his door this morning after his alarm went off, and had told him that she failed a big English test and the teacher was being unnecessarily hard on her.

She had signed up for a parent-teacher interview, but was too scared to tell Krolia, part because she didn’t want Krolia to eviscerate her teacher and part because she didn’t want to disappoint her aunt. So Keith’s decided to step up and has taken an early lunch so that he can meet Romelle at her school. She’s the one that’s told him to pretend to be her father, because otherwise her stodgy teacher won’t take either of them seriously.

Keith kills the engine of his fire truck-red pickup in the visitor’s parking, staring up at the large and intimidating building. Romelle waves from the front steps impatiently, and taps her foot as she waits for Keith to get out of his car and jog towards her.

“We’re five minutes late,” she says, voice heavy with urgency as she opens the front door for him. “Do you know what you’re going to say?”

“Yeah,” Keith nods, and straightens out the collar of his white t-shirt. He’s still in dirty jeans and dirty boots, but he keeps a clean shirt in the back of his pick up just incase and he thinks that walking into a classroom without dirt stains all over him will probably help his case. “I’m going to be your terribly angry father with a short fuse, wondering why they didn’t take five seconds out of their day to read your file.”

“They read my file,” Romelle says, huffing slightly as she jogs beside him. Keith takes long strides down the hallway, working himself up. “Turn down this way. They just thought it wasn’t that big a deal.”

“Great,” Keith says and catches his reflection in the glass of a display case. “I’m going to be your terribly _livid_ father now.”

He brushes his bangs off his face, because Pidge has told him repeatedly that he’s a lot scarier when he’s not hiding behind his bangs like a sheepdog. Both her and Hunk say that his forehead’s more expressive. He’s not quite sure what that means, but he takes it anyways. His work boots clunk heavy against the linoleum floors of the hall and he makes sure to put extra weight in them, drawing stares from a couple of parents waiting outside of classrooms.

“This is the one, right?” Keith asks, gesturing to room 308. Worked up, he doesn’t wait for Romelle to answer before he twists the knob and throws the door open. She says something, but he doesn’t hear her as he barges in.

“You,” he says, pouring enough heat into it to make the teacher on the other end stand up. “Do you not understand the purpose of an education plan?”

“Sir-” the teacher starts, and Keith holds up his hand. Romelle circles his elbow with her arm, and he takes it as a sign that maybe he came in a little too dramatically, but he’s going to ride the wave out anyways. After all, he did take an early lunch break for this.

“Don’t _sir_ me,” Keith jabs a finger in the direction of the teacher, channelling every dance mom he has ever seen on the TLC. “There’s a reason my daughter has an IEP and you can’t just brush over it because you think it’s _not a big deal_!”

“K- uh, Dad,” Romelle starts a little louder, but Keith shakes his head.

“You can’t fail her because _you_ can’t be bothered to make accommodations,” Keith barrels on. “Accommodations which, by the way, involve minimal effort on your part. We made sure that everything was set in order when she transferred to this school, so that the teachers wouldn’t have a hard time adapting. It seems like each of them got the memo except for you.”

Keith crosses his arms over his chest and glares at the teacher to further emphasize his point. The teacher’s standing and staring with his eyes wide and mouth partially open, but Keith’s too busy thinking of his next string of angry complaints to pay attention. He opens his mouth to continue, but feels a hand against his bicep.

“Keith,” Romelle says, voice strained. It’s enough for Keith to notice and he turns to look down at her. She looks like she’s been caught in a permanent state of wincing, and he raises his eyebrows.

“What?” he asks, and Romelle takes a deep inhale in.

“That’s not the teacher,” she says, so quietly that Keith almost misses it. “We’re in the wrong room.”

Everything grinds to a halt around Keith. The righteous anger that had been filling him up immediately dissipates as Keith faintly realizes that Romelle had told him her teacher’s name. He doesn’t quite remember it but it is very pointedly not the _MR.SHIROGANE, MATH DEPT_ that is scrawled neatly under the _HELLO MY NAME IS_ tag he’s wearing. Keith knows that at the very least, the teacher in question belongs to the English department.

He also realizes that this is probably what Romelle had kept trying to interrupt him with. He has a very brief but vivid flashback to every single time he had tried to get his mother’s attention, and thinks that him ignoring a teenager is probably the largest marker of adulthood that he’s passed.

The final realization that both ties this into a neat bow and kind of starts to crush Keith, is the realization that the man in front of him is not only the wrong teacher, but is also _devastatingly_ handsome.

It’s not just the brilliant white hair and young chiseled face that makes Keith place him at around the same age as himself or a little older. It’s not just the fact the teacher is tall and broad and wearing a grey Henley that’s got its right sleeve pinned neatly and is just on this side of snug. This man exudes handsomeness that Keith’s only ever seen on a television or theatre screen, and it’s oddly comforting yet intimidating. Keith’s not sure whether to look at the strong jaw or the light brown eyes or to just generally absorb the sight of a man that looks likes like he was sculpted by some higher being.

“Uh,” Keith says. It’s all he can muster right now. The other man blinks and Keith presses his lips together, despite knowing full and well that he’s both too stunned and embarrassed to say anything further.

“I’m so sorry, Mr.Shirogane,” Romelle squeaks out from beside him and tugs on Keith’s sleeve.

“Right- um,” Keith tries again. Attempting to speak again is a mistake because Keith’s still extremely distressed by the muscle definition he can see through the other man’s shirt. All he can seem to do is open and close his mouth like a particularly surprised goldfish. “Have a nice day.”

With that, he turns on his heel and lets Romelle pull him out of the room. He tells her he’s only red because he’s embarrassed that he stormed into the wrong room and acted like a complete asshole. Unfortunately, teenage girls are unfairly perceptive and Keith thinks that he doesn’t like the knowing smile that Romelle gives him.  


* * *

 

Adjusting to life in a cookie-cutter suburb has been kind to Shiro for the most part. He has been able to find a job for one, teaching freshman and sophomore math at the local high school. He needs to drive only six and a half minutes to get to work and it means that he gets a fairly decent parking spot and a fairly decent amount of sleep. He’s also been able to spend more time with his grandparents, who have taken him in with the same gusto they had when he lived with them for all of middle and high school. It’s odd that life’s this kind to him, but he supposes that it’s a sort of karmic balance.

Shiro has spent a lot of time telling a lot of people not to baby him since his accident. But it doesn’t count when his grandmother refuses to let him out of the house for work until he’s eaten a hefty breakfast that’s met her standard of approval. Last time he had tried to microwave a bowl of instant oatmeal for himself, Shiro had gotten thwacked around the ears with the morning paper till he had conceded. He tells himself that he balances it out anyways because every Saturday morning, Shiro’s made to join his grandparents in deep cleaning the house, something he does with a lot more gratefulness now than he did when he was a teenager.

He does a lot of other things too, like go for grocery runs and continuously “forget” his grandparents’ credit card at home. Being out shopping is one of the times when Shiro is acutely aware that people stare. It’s been a few months since he’s moved back to this town so he doesn’t get as many looks, but toddlers and old folks love to stare with no compunction. Shiro’s more attuned to it and he tries to tell himself to not let it bother him in hopes that eventually it won’t. Still, as he stands in front of a row of soup cans, he can feel the uncomfortable prickle of someone’s unwavering gaze.

Shiro doesn’t look back. He never really does, because he’s not a fan of the sight of people scrambling and pretending that they weren’t staring. Or unashamedly continuing to look. He puts three cans of chicken broth into his cart and moves away in the opposite direction.

It’s fine for a bit, but the sensation of being watched comes back when he’s inspecting packages of dried cloud ears. It’s also there when he’s humming to himself and trying to remember what brand of coconut milk his grandmother wanted.

And when he’s hauling a sack of rice into the cart. He feels the prickle of a stare on the back of his neck, and shrugs it off.

And when he’s in the ice cream aisle, heavily debating between rum raisin and a chocolate fudge explosion. Shiro counts to twenty when he feels the stare again, before he sighs loudly and closes the freezer door.

“Can I help you?” Shiro asks, voice tired in a way he knows induces at least a modicum of guilt. As he turns, he comes face to face with the father that had stormed into his classroom last week. Shiro blinks.

“Er- sorry,” the man says, scratching the back of his head. Shiro tries to rack his brains as much as possible to remember Romelle’s last name so that he can properly address him. He draws a blank and frowns a little. “I didn’t mean to be a creep just— Mr.Shirogane, right?”

“Yes,” Shiro nods, and the man shifts his basket to his other hand. Idly, Shiro notices that his knuckles are red and rough, but his fingers are long and tapered and delicate. It’s a weird thing to notice so Shiro dilutes himself by asking, “You’re Romelle’s father, right?”

The man looks incredibly sheepish at that, and Shiro doesn’t blame him for it. He’s had a good laugh with some of the other teachers over the incident. He’s also put in a word with Romelle’s English teacher, because the father’s complaints did seem pretty serious. Shiro doesn’t teach Romelle in a class, but she’s in his Tuesday-lunch math tutoring program, and she’s one of the hardest workers. The teacher had given him a tart “ _I know_ ” because apparently the father had come in with as much vehemence to them as he did with Shiro.

It’s odd seeing Romelle’s father here though; even more odd if he’s been the one that’s been following Shiro around. The man opens his mouth before closing it. He repeats this again, and presses his lips together. Shiro’s not quite sure where he’s going with it. “Call me Keith.”

“Alright,” Shiro replies, rolling around the name in his brain a little more than necessary. Keith stays silent.

He’s clearly uncomfortable and Shiro manages to catch a glimpse of the six pack of red bull and box of spaghetti westerns sitting in Keith’s basket. Shiro is in no place to judge; he had a similar basket a few nights ago at 4 a.m at a local Walgreens, when he was nervous about the first round of parent teacher interviews he would be conducting.

Shiro’s just recently been minted as a full-fledged teacher. He’s working as a long-term substitute for someone on maternity leave, and this is his first teaching gig. He had gotten a lot of warnings about parent-teacher interviews, and having someone storm in and yelling from the get-go had seemed to be par on course for whatever his more seasoned colleagues had told him to expect.

Unfortunately, being a math teacher meant that the incident with Romelle’s father - _Keith_ \- only ranked sixth on the worst parent-teacher interviews he had. After the interviews had passed, Shiro had sat on the weathered couch of the teacher’s lounge, staring wordlessly at the large ficus in the corner of the room with one of the science teachers.

“I didn’t meant to be weird, I just wanted to apologize,” Keith breaks the silence with a rush of words, stumbling out like they’re trying to run away from him. Shiro raises his eyebrows. “I stormed in and uh- I yelled at you. I should have apologized before I left but I was really embarrassed. So I’m. Uh. I’m apologizing now.”

“Oh,” Shiro replies, then gives a smile. He feels awkward, rightfully so, but he’s also oddly fascinated by how the weird lighting of the grocery store makes Keith’s eyes almost look violet. “It’s okay. It sounded like you had a lot of reason to be mad.”

“I swear I’m not an asshole,” Keith says so firmly that it brings out a chuckle from Shiro. He shakes his head as he waves him off.

“It’s seriously okay,” Shiro assures him. Shiro’s kind of glad that he hadn’t been followed around the store by some weirdo. “It’s not the worst thing that happened to me that day.”

“It’s not?” Keith asks, and Shiro shakes his head again.

“No,” Shiro informs him, opening the door of the freezer to pick out his ice cream. “My very last interview was a father who went twenty minutes over our allotted time by ranting about math’s viability as a school subject and asking me to boost his kid’s grade by fifteen percent.”

He hears a snort as he stacks one container of ice cream on top of the other and picks them up. He toes the door close before he dumps the tubs in the cart, and sees that Keith’s smile is less embarrassed now.

“That sounds terrible,” Keith says. “I think I feel a little better.”

“You should,” Shiro informs him. “You were just looking out for Romelle.”

“Either way,” Keith says. “Won’t happen again, Mr.Shirogane.”

“You don’t need to call me Mr. Shirogane,” Shiro says. “Shiro is fine.”

“Shiro,” the name rolls of Keith’s tongue with a small rasp, and Shiro nods. “Well, I’ll get out of your hair then.”

Shiro gives him a genuine smile at that, and waves at him as they part ways, Keith giving him a two-finger salute in return. Later on that day when he’s sitting on the couch and marking tests, he keeps thinking about dark hair pulled into a messy ponytail; a deep red shirt sitting under a worn leather jacket; a grin that had pinged a light within him. It makes him acutely aware of how long it’s been since he’s been on a date.

But that’s neither here nor there.

 

* * *

 

Keith has made some mistakes in his life. Some he’s learned to let slide and some he’s learned to learn from. Some he regrets in small amounts, while others creep up in the middle of the night while he’s trying to sleep. Some of them he regrets immensely— this mistake being one of them.

“I think I see him by the flagpole,” Pidge says from the back, and a quick look over his shoulder as Keith switches into the right most lane shows Pidge pressing her face against the window of his truck.

“No you don’t,” Keith says adamantly, and his mother hums from the passenger seat. It’s got a contemplative tone to it that Keith decidedly does not like.

“The one with the white hair, right?” she asks and Keith says “ _No_ ” at the same time that Pidge chirps an affirmative. Pidge rolls down her window and Keith rolls it back up from the driver’s seat as they edge forward in the after-school traffic. Pidge tries to roll it back down, and Keith hits the lock for the truck windows. In the rearview mirror, Keith can see Pidge pout and flip him off like they’re both high-schoolers and not twenty-somethings who run a business together.

“He’s handsome from a distance,” Krolia says, but frowns. “Are you sure he’s your age though?”

“He’s young when you see him close,” Keith says almost automatically, and promptly snaps his mouth shut. The damage has been done— his mother gives him a deeply amused look as he pointedly stares ahead.

Keith regrets making the mistake of not dropping Pidge home after their last job and before picking Romelle up from school. He also regrets making a stop at his house to pick up the phone he had forgotten, because Pidge had asked his mother if she wanted to tag along and see who Keith may or may not have a small crush on.

“Matt’s mentioned Shirogane before,” Pidge says. “If you want, I can get him to put in a word.”

“That’s not necessary,” Keith grits out, and his mother puts a hand on his shoulder. He tries to shrug it off and she pinches his cheek instead. “I don’t want to bother him.”

“You’re just going to follow him around grocery stores, right?” Krolia teases, and Keith groans.

 _No one_ has let him live it down— he was just trying to apologize to Shiro. Pidge and Romelle have clowned him hard, while his mother keeps telling him how precious he is. He can’t help the fact that his brain had to restart approximately ten times before he was able to actually start a conversation. Everyone’s quick to make fun of him, but he thinks that they too would find it hard to speak if they came face to face with someone who looks like they should be making their money modelling instead of teaching.

Keith had told Pidge first about the entire incident, from the parent-teacher meeting to the grocery store. She had laughed and wriggled her eyebrows in his direction, asking if he wanted Matt to find out more details on the man. Keith had shook his head, because he doesn’t want Matt to go out of his way to find a teacher outside of his department. Also because Matt’s the worst wingman alive. It’s a genetic trait, so he pointedly told Pidge that while he found Shiro attractive, that was it and he didn’t need any third party interference.

When he told Romelle, it had been slightly worse. It had been followed by a twenty-second-long stare on her behalf, before she squinted her eyes and asked a “Do you _like_ Mr.Shirogane?” in the most suspicious voice possible. Keith is twenty-three, but in that moment he had reverted back to being eight.

“I _don’t_ ,” he had said with a lot of vehemence, but his ears had started to flush. Looking like she won the lottery, Romelle had thrown the pillow she had been sitting with on the couch at Keith and squealed.

“I can’t believe you like Mr.Shirogane,” she had laughed, and Keith had tried to lob the pillow back at her.

Ultimately, Romelle decided that the previous fear she had over telling her aunt about her English teacher was secondary to the look on Krolia’s face as she recounted the story in its entirety. Keith knows this is partly because the English teacher’s agreed to adjust the grade and be more accomodating for Romelle, but he also know it’s because it’s the household hobby to tease Keith about any and everything.

The only person who hasn’t made fun of him yet is his father, who listened patiently as Krolia recounted it over the phone with Romelle providing additional commentary. He had told Keith in a grave tone that as a man, it was his duty to _woo_ and not stalk, and that when he was back from his trip he would teach Keith the art of flirting, and _that_ had elicited a round of laughter so loud from Krolia and Romelle that no amount of red-faced sputtering on Keith’s behalf could drown it out.

“We’re getting closer,” Pidge sing-songs as Keith turns into the school. Keith sees Romelle in the distance, and he honks. She looks from where she was on her phone, and she waves at him. And then—

And then Romelle starts walking away, directly towards the flagpole. Where Shiro is standing. Keith adds offering Romelle a ride home to his list of regrets. He honks again, hoping to get her to come here instead, but he sees her turn to Shiro and say something that he really wishes he could hear. Shiro looks a little surprised, before he smiles at her and says something in return. Keith honks for the third time, eliciting some responding honks from nearby cars, and inches the truck forward. Romelle looks over at him, and stays put.

“You need to go a little ahead if you want to pick her up,” Krolia informs him. “I suggest driving closer to the flagpole.”

“Make sure you’re as close to the curb as possible,” Pidge suggests as Keith grumbles and tries not to turn pink.

Keith wants to delay his mom and Pidge from seeing Shiro as much as possible so he inches the truck forward slowly. So slow that a car honks behind him. Grudgingly, he releases the break enough for the truck to roll forward till it’s close enough for both his passengers to get a good look at Shiro. Krolia lets out a low whistle, and Keith swears he hears Pidge let out a laugh.

“I think your taste in men is hereditary,” she supplies from the back and Keith’s tempted to bang his head against the steering wheel as Krolia laughs and says, “You can say that again.” Keith wonders if it’s too late to tell Romelle to bus home. Or Pidge, because she tells him to unlock her window so that she can roll it down and look at Shiro without the tint.

“He’s very handsome,” Krolia adds, and reaches over Keith to unlock the windows. Krolia rolls hers down, and calls out Romelle’s name, interrupting whatever conversation she was having with Shiro.

Keith thinks he’ll be hidden in the shadow of the driver’s seat, but Shiro waves at him as Romelle slips into the backseat. Keith gives a half-wave back, and he sees the corners of his mother’s eyes crinkle as she gives Shiro a wide smile. He’s not quite sure why, given that she doesn’t even know him, but Krolia specializes in embarrassing him at any moment she can. Keith’s just glad that his father’s currently in Vegas with Sam Holt and Alfor, too far away to get too involved.

Romelle buckles in, and Keith rolls up all the windows of the truck. He hits the lock button again, determined to prevent all the women in his car from giving Shiro terrifying looks. He’s barely pulled away, when Romelle asks the car at large, “Did you guys get a good look?”

“Keith’s right,” Krolia says before Keith can say anything in protest, and he can see Pidge from the backseat twist to take a look back. He thinks this is payback for every time he’s teased her for having a crush. Which has been _every_ time. “He does look young.”

“Are you sure you don’t want me to ask Matt?” Pidge quips. “It’s probably better than stalking him.”

“That wasn’t stalking. I did that to apologize,” Keith grumps, and catches the way Pidge and Romelle snicker. “I’m serious.”

“Mr.Shirogane is really nice,” Romelle says. “He’s also new and everyone thinks he’s really hot. Because he is. I’ll ask him if he’s single for you.”

“You’re not going to do anything like that,” Keith says, and Romelle makes a disappointed noise. “And don’t call him hot.”

“Sorry Keith,” Romelle says sweetly. “I didn’t know you were possessive over your boyfriend.”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” Keith insists,and Romelle snorts. “Shut up.”

“Manners,” his mother warns, and Keith knows she’s only doing it because the three of them have plans to make fun of him for the entire car ride home.

(And they do. It’s brutal. Keith gives up on fighting the redness that takes over his face as Romelle keeps calling him _Keith Shirogane_ , much to Krolia and Pidge’s amusement.

Keith finds some minimal comfort in the fact that he’s yet to tell him that he’s been told to just call him Shiro.)

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like this fic is a great map of the downward trajectory of my sanity

Slowly, Shiro blinks awake. He stares blearily at the alarm clock sitting on the table; it reads a bright red 8:26 A.M, and he wonders why the hell his body has woken him up so early. He had spent a wild Friday night last night marking papers for the express purpose of freeing up his weekend to do nothing but sleep all day.

Shiro sighs and closes his eyes, and is about to roll over when the sound of the doorbell rings in the basement. He groans, slinging his arm over his head.

Vaguely, he remembers his grandparents shaking him awake a little while earlier. They had said something about having gotten someone to come dig out the dead tree stump in the front yard, and to give the person the money sitting in front of the television while they go out on their walk. The doorbell rings across the bungalow again. Grudgingly, Shiro rolls out of bed with a groan.

“I’m coming,” he calls out. He scans his room for the cleanest clothes he can find, and pulls on the thick gray pair of sweats and dull red shirt sitting on top of his laundry basket. He grabs his wallet too so that he can bypass the crisp bills sitting on the lobby table as he heads towards the door. Shiro’s stomach grumbles loudly, and he feels slight mourning at the sound because he’s going to be too hungry to go back to sleep. He yawns and runs his fingers through his hair to tame the bedhead just a little, before he unlocks the front door.

For a moment, his head is still swimming with sleep so Shiro doesn’t quite register who he opens the door to. They’ve got their back turned to him and only pivot once the door fully creaks open. Immediately, Shiro wishes he had worn something better.

Standing on his front step, grimy and sweating through a thin grey tank top with his hair up in loose ponytail is Keith. He smells strongly of dirt and outside, and there’s a streak of earth across his forehead. Shiro thinks he might still be dreaming, partly because he feels his brain to mouth filter slowly disconnecting and mostly because Keith looks like he’s fresh out of a Levi’s outdoor campaign.

“Hey,” Keith says after a moment, digging his hands into his pockets. It looks effortlessly cool. “I’m here about the tree?”

The town’s not too big, so it’s not that big a surprise that a student’s father is also the landscaper that Shiro’s grandparents hired, but he still does a double take. Something in Shiro tells him that might have less to do with the coincidence and more to do with the general shock of seeing sharp features first thing in the morning.

“Yeah,” Shiro replies. He winces at how his voice cracks, still sleep-heavy. “Yeah, uh, hold on.”

“Sure,” Keith says. He waits and watches as Shiro digs out his wallet and looks over his shoulder on the table in the lobby. Shiro squints and counts the bills his grandparents left, and thumbs out the equivalent from his wallet.

“Your tree and I are going to be on your front lawn for the next twenty minutes if that’s okay,” Keith says as Shiro holds his wallet between his teeth counts the money again. “My ride had to go get something for my next job.”

“Busy day today?” Shiro asks, voice muffled around the leather as he hands over the bills. Keith doesn’t double check them them as he takes them and rolls them, shoving them into his pocket as he nods.

“This was my third job this morning,” Keith says, and Shiro gives him a sympathetic look as he drops his wallet from his mouth to his hand and tucks it into the pocket of his sweatpants. “Lots of digging up trees specifically. There’s been a nasty influx of beetles killing people’s plants in the neighbourhood.”

“You said twenty minutes till your ride’s here, right?” Shiro asks, and Keith nods. “Did you want something to drink? I just woke up so I can put some coffee on if you want.”

There’s silence and for a moment, Shiro wonders if he’s crossed some sort of unspoken social boundary. But Keith nods again, with a “ _sure_ ,” that’s soft and crackling. Shiro really needs to properly wake up.

Keith toes off his dirt-caked boots outside and follows Shiro into the hall of the bungalow. It’s not a long way to the kitchen, and Keith washes his hands at the sink before he takes an offered seat on the edge of one of the barstools at the small kitchen island.

“Sorry I took a while at the door,” Shiro says as he putters around, filling the coffee maker with water and putting in the filter. “My grandparents told me before they left that they had kept money away for the landscaper, but I was still asleep.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Keith says, and Shiro clicks the lid of the coffee maker shut. “Your grandparents, huh?”

“Yeah,” Shiro nods, and something in him instantly starts to go on the defensive. It’s quickly shut down though, because Keith makes a thoughtful look and nods.

“Your grandmother looks super young,” he says, and Shiro lets out a short laugh and grins at him.

“She’d be happy to hear that,” he says, and gets an easy smile in return. Bright morning light washes through the backyard window and into the kitchen, and illuminates Keith. He holds himself in a relaxed way, back slightly slouched and fingers idly drumming across the countertop of the island.

Shiro knows he thinks Keith’s good looking. He’s thought about him on and off since their run-in at the grocery store, and it’s run in tandem with him thinking about how woefully single he is. It’s easy to have eyes and to see how handsome Keith is. In the light, Keith looks young— really young, and if Shiro didn’t know better, he’d have never guessed he’s the father of a highschooler. If he had her young, it’d pin him at around Shiro’s age and if he didn’t, Keith’s genetics have been extremely kind to him.

“Do you want anything to eat?” Shiro asks, and Keith shakes his head. “You sure?”

“I don’t want to be too much trouble,” Keith says, and Shiro’s about to insist but he remembers that Keith said he only has twenty minutes. He still takes out a plate and piles on whatever he can dig out from the cookie jar, and sets them out in front of Keith.

“How long are you working till today?” Shiro asks, and Keith picks up a sugar cookie. He gives it a contemplative look before answering Shiro.

“All day,” he says, sighing before he pops the cookie into his mouth. “Weekends are the busiest for me.”

“That’s not too fun,” Shiro says, and Keith shrugs. “Milk and sugar?”

“I’ll take it black,” he says as Shiro pours out their coffee. “It’s not too bad. In the evening, I get to bring my dog along.”

“You have a dog?” Shiro asks, voice perking up as he brings over their mugs.

“Thank you,” Keith says, looking gratefully at the coffee. Shiro’s sure the day’s been impossibly long for him if he’s on his third job and it isn’t even nine in the morning yet. “Yeah, he’s a lab-chow mix. Wanna see?”

Shiro’s never going to turn down an opportunity to look at someone’s dog, and he doesn’t regret not turning down this one when Keith takes his phone out and shows Shiro his lockscreen. It’s a picture of the furriest black dog Shiro’s seen in his life, tongue hanging out as he wears an electric blue birthday hat.

“I’m so jealous,” Shiro sees, leaning in to get a better look. The dog’s eyes are a mesmerizing shade of grey, and Shiro’s never felt so much envy in his life. 

“He looks cool but he’s a doof,” Keith puts his phone on the counter, and Shiro steals one last look before the screen goes black. “He’s a good boy though.”

“I want to get a dog, but I just moved in,” Shiro says, and Keith hums. “I don’t want to put too much stress on my grandparents.”

“How long ago did you move in?” he asks, taking a sip of his coffee.

“A month before the school year started,” Shiro runs a hand through his hair and scratches the back of his head, a nervous habit he’s not quite gotten rid of. He loves his grandparents, but it’s more common than not for people to be weird about his living situation. “I finished up my teacher’s college and came straight here.”

“Cool,” Keith says. “I came back after I finished my undergrad too.”

“I like it,” Shiro replies, and they both reach for the same cookie at the same time. Keith gestures towards Shiro to take it, so Shiro breaks it in half and offers the other piece to Keith. “But I haven’t seen a lot of it. I lived with them when I was in highschool, but they lived in a different state.”

“There’s not much to do here,” Keith replies. “But it’s a nice town.”

“Yeah?” Shiro says, raising an eyebrow and Keith nods as he sips his coffee slowly.

Keith, as it turns out, is incredibly easy to talk to. He’s concise with his words but the rasp in his tone is soothing, and he’s an encyclopedia for all the interesting things to do in a fifty mile radius. He grew up in this town, left for university, and came back while he settled down from his post-grad haze. He started a landscaping business with a friend, and he’s been making his money that way.

Keith doesn’t tell Shiro more about Romelle than he already knows, but Shiro doesn’t prod. In turn, Keith doesn’t ask about his arm, nor does he keep glancing towards the empty space on Shiro’s right in hopes that Shiro will pick up the silent hint and instigate the conversation around it.

Shiro does tell Keith that he studied aviation and was a test pilot for a couple of years before he went to teacher’s college. It turns out that Keith had loved the idea of flying growing up, and had learned how to fly gliders in high-school. He’s out of practice right now but he’s always been meaning to go back. Keith tells Shiro that there’s a small airfield a hundred miles south that services small gliders and bush-planes, and that he knows the superintendent of the site if Shiro’s ever curious about it. Keith asks if he misses flying and Shiro replies honestly; he does, and sometimes he still dreams about piloting, but he’s having fun teaching classes where his students chide each other if they mispronounce his last name.

The more they talk, the more open Keith’s demeanour becomes. He’s not too expressive when he talks, but he does it with a sincerity that tugs Shiro into further conversation. Shiro wants to know about his business, wants to know why he chose landscaping, wants to see more pictures of his dog, and the minutes fly by in a wink. Keith’s in the middle of showing Shiro a video of his dog barking at the television, when there is a series of extremely loud honks in the distance.

Both Shiro and Keith jump in their seats, and Keith swears.

“Jesus,” he says, pushing off the stool he’s sitting on. “You’d think a text would do.”

“You can leave your mug there,” Shiro says, and Keith dutifully sets down the cup he had lifted off the table. “I’ll take care of it. That your ride?”

“One and only,” Keith sighs, tucking his phone into his back pocket. It starts to vibrate, but he ignores it as they walk to the front foyer. Shiro opens the door and sees a vivid green Prius parked on the curb in front of his house. The trunk of the car is popped open, and a short woman with sandy pigtails is hauling in a large burlap-wrapped tree stump into the back of it.

“We have two trucks for a reason,” Keith groans from behind him, and the woman looks up. She breaks out into a wide, beaming smile and Shiro waves as Keith steps out beside him. “She always does this to bug me.”

The woman blows a kiss in Keith’s direction, and Keith grunts as he shoves his feet back into his boots. It’s a small action, but it drops a weight in Shiro’s gut that he’s not proud of. He’s quick to recognize what he sees, and the fondly exasperated grin Keith flashes towards the woman is extremely familiar. But Shiro’s nothing if not quick to bounce back so he tries to slide back into the casual beat of the conversation they were having.

“Is that your girlfriend?” he asks, tipping his chin at the woman, who’s currently finishing up bungee cording the trunk secure over the tree stump. Keith stumbles a little as he tries to push his left foot back into his boot, and Shiro tries again. “Wife?”

“I’m not married,” Keith laughs, brushing his hands off on his jeans. “She’s just my partner.”

“Oh,” Shiro realizes he’s really not sounding as casual as he thought he was, so he decides to end that line of questioning abruptly. He’ll deal with the disappointment later. “You did a great job by the way. My grandma’s going to be happy.”

“No problem,” Keith replies, and digs into one of his pockets. He pulls out a card and flips it over, and takes out a pen. Keith tugs the cap off with his teeth and scrawls something on the back. Shiro spends a lot more time watching the action that he’d like to admit, and a loud honking sound startles him again.

“I’m coming,” Keith calls out, shaking his head as he turns to Shiro and hands him a card. “Hey, if you want any more work done, this is my direct cell. It’ll be easier to get in touch with me this way.”

 _KEITH_ is scrawled across the back of the card, along with ten digits. Shiro takes it, flips it to look at the number.

“Thanks for the coffee,” Keith says as he steps down the porch with a wave. Guilt creeps into Shiro as he watches Keith retreat towards the car, and he raises his hand to return the gesture.

It was only twenty minutes, Shiro tells himself. Thirty technically, because Keith’s girlfriend had been running late. Retrospectively, Shiro should have probably casually asked Keith if he was seeing someone at the very beginning and it’s his own fault that he had gone mushy at the first sight of a sweaty, dark-haired and dark-eyed man. Shiro could ruminate on this, but he could also go back into the house and suppress his feelings by frying and eating a pound of bacon before hitting the gym.

“Don’t mention it,” he murmurs as he sees Keith hop into the passenger seat. It’s more for himself than for Keith.

 

 

* * *

 

 

It’s not till Keith’s five minutes out from Shiro’s out that he has a horrifying realization.

“He thinks you’re what?” Pidge blinks, and Keith can tell she’s just a fraction of a second away from an extremely obnoxious laughing fit.

“I _think_ he thinks I’m your partner,” Keith makes a vague gesture towards the dashboard of the truck. “Like, in the romantic way.”

“What?” Pidge asks. Demands. “Why?”

Keith gives her a deadpan look and knows that as innocent as she looks, she takes all the pleasure in the world in being a shit starter. He recounts the way Shiro had asked if Pidge was his girlfriend or wife, and what Keith had replied with. In hindsight, Keith knows he could have been a lot more specific and that there’s no one to blame but himself.

Pidge stays silent till they reach a red light on a busier intersection. She puts the truck into park and takes the opportunity to turn fully on her seat,clearing her throat.

Keith is never, _ever_ going to tell her that he had actually been feeling extremely confident about handing Shiro his card up until this very moment. Keith feels like a monumental idiot right now, and he’s glad he didn’t brag about giving Shiro his number as soon as he got in the car because Pidge would tell _everyone_ and Keith would never be able to live it down.

“Look at me,” she says, and Keith pointedly does not. “Keith.”

“It’s fine,” he mutters, and tries very valiantly to fight back the blush that’s creeping up his cheeks. “Seriously, it’s okay.”

The light thankfully turns green, so Keith’s spared being made to make eye contact with Pidge like a dog that’s done something wrong. It’s only five minutes till the next house, but Pidge spends the entire time alternating between calling Keith an idiot and trying to flick his ear. By the time they reach the next job, Keith feels suitably chastised and Pidge looks slightly smug.

And he’s still not quite sure how he’s supposed to clear things up with Shiro.

 

* * *

 

 

The morning air is crisp around Shiro, and he takes another deep inhale as his feet hit the pavement. He’s in a light sweater and shorts and is definitely getting overheated; he’s thinking he should have worn pants and a t-shirt instead. Ideally, Shiro would be able to jog in just his sweatpants, but unfortunately he lives too close to his school and risks having one of his students see him running around without a shirt.

The sun’s casting a gorgeous golden-pink glow over everything, and Shiro makes sure he exhales evenly. He’s got plans to hit the gym after, right before he has to go to work, because lately he’s had a lot more energy buzzing in him than usual. Shiro has been working a majority of it out in the gym, but he’s been delivering his lessons with a lot more gusto over the past few days. He tells himself that this excess energy is inexplicable, even though deep down he can pinpoint why.

He takes a turn down a block and side-steps someone trying to pull along their extremely lazy golden retriever. Shiro tries to clear his head again, squeezes his left hand to work out some of the extra fidget. The wind is a little sharper against his face and he knows he’s slowly picking up his pace. He’s only got a little over a mile left, so he leaves it. It’ll be good for him, and maybe he won’t spend the morning announcement spinning a pencil in his hand like he’s a showy drummer.

Shiro’s stream of thought is interrupted by the sound of cascading metal hitting the pavement and Shiro looks to see where the crashing sound came from. He sees a bright red pickup truck across the street, and sees various garden tools lying scattered around the asphalt. He’s surprised that’s all that’s fallen, because the bed of the truck looks over-jammed with stuff— there’s a large tree with its roots bundled up in burlap sticking out of the bed of the truck, sitting on top of it all and while it looks like it’s secured down with chains, Shiro can see some tools sticking out that aren’t.

More importantly, after he jogs a little more, Shiro can see around the bed and spots the manifestation of everything’s that’s been distracting him.

Standing over the pile, swearing as he bends down to pick up stuff is Keith, hair loose and not in its usual ponytail. He looks a little flustered, and Shiro uses that as a reason to take a sharp right and jog across the street.

“Hey!” Shiro calls out to the man that he’s thought about a little too much over the past few days. “You need help?”

Keith’s taken, and he’s repeatedly told himself that. But Shiro thinks that as long as it stays just a crush, he’ll be fine. He’s allowed to have one of those for a little bit and anyways— he’s jogging over to Keith to help him out because he genuinely wants to.

Keith blinks in Shiro’s direction for a moment as Shiro slows down to a halt in front of him, panting. Shiro gives him a quick wave before bending down to pick up the handles of two rakes with one hand. It’s not till he props it up against the open bed of the pickup that Keith suddenly snaps back into existence.

“Sorry,” Keith says, bending down to pick up a few scattered spades. “ Thanks man.”

Shiro laughs at that, and helps Keith gather up the tools. Keith doesn’t quite make eye contact with him, but Shiro can relate to being caught zoning out and having the physical evidence strewn all around.

“Do you need help closing the gate?” Shiro asks, gesturing towards the truck and Keith shakes his head.

“I got it,” he says. “I was just having a weird morning.”

“No worries,” Shiro says easily and to his credit, he manages to keep his cool and not tack on a lame joke at the end. Keith smells like earth and sweat and holds himself with the same natural stoicism as a man from a classic western movie and it’s sending his brain for a tailspin. Shiro’s got to attempt to at least keep his hand on the wheel. “You working a job?”

“Yeah,” Keith says, hauling in another dirty shovel. “Someone wanted me to dig up a tree, but this was the only time they were free and they wanted to make sure I didn’t hurt the roots because we’re moving it in a couple of days.”

It’s just a little south of seven in the morning, and Shiro can’t imagine how early Keith would have to wake up to dig out an entire tree. On his own, from the looks of it, because Shiro can’t see anyone else around. It’d be extremely easy to ask Keith casually if he’s had a proper breakfast yet but Shiro reminds himself that he’s got to keep it at a crush. Just because he’s got a mini internal crisis going on, he can’t sound too enthusiastic that he’s got the chance to talk a little more to Keith.

“Got a lot of work today?” he asks, hoping he’s reaching the midpoint and sounding like a normal human being. Keith shrugs as they pile the last of the tools on.

“Can you close the gate?” Keith asks, and Shiro nods. The tree is tied down pretty well, but the chains still have some give so Keith presses the bundled roots up and forward, letting out a grunt as he does so. Shiro quickly pushes up the gate of the truck bed till it clicks into place, and Keith drops the tree. It’s a bare fit, but it works, and Keith brushes his hands off on his jeans

“Thanks,” he says, offering Shiro a smile. “And yeah, after I transport this tree I have to spend the rest of the day working on one person’s backyard so that it looks exactly like what they have on their Pinterest board.”

“Sounds more exciting than my day,” Shiro says in return. “Each one of my classes has a big test today, and they’ve already been preemptively giving me the stink-eye.”

 _That_ gets a laugh out of Keith, one that ticks up a little. Shiro likes it, he finds, and he’s concerned with how much he wants to hear that sound again.

“Romelle said you’re very popular with the students,” Keith says, and Shiro raises his eyebrows. “So I wouldn’t be worried.”

Shiro rolls his eyes at that, because his students alternate between making jokes about his white hair, jokes about how “jacked” he is, and jokes about that one time he wore a bright red cardigan over a white shirt. They somehow have something fresh to say about the same three topics each time, and Shiro would be lying if he said it didn’t bring him some degree of amusement.

“Popular’s not the word I would use,” he says, and Keith snorts. “Validation doesn’t count when it comes from teenagers.”

“Alright,” Keith clicks his teeth, and Shiro frowns.

“I’m serious,” he says, trying not to grin and it’s incredibly tempting to give a juvenile shove at Keith and tell him to quit it.

Shiro’s hand, in fact, makes it all the way to Keith’s shoulder before he realizes what he’s doing. He freezes when his hand’s already made contact, and it then strikes him that they’re both grown men. Unfortunately, he can’t retract his hand due to the fact that the act in the first place has struck a chord of embarrassment so loud within him that it’s paralytic.

His brain grasps for something, _anything_ that’ll allow him to move. Keith looks at his hand, then at him, and Shiro opens his mouth. Before he speaks, he sends a quick prayer out to whoever is listening that whatever words come out of his mouth don’t end up embarrassing him.

“I got to run,” he says, and then tacks on intelligently, “Or finish my run.”

“Okay,” Keith says, and then presses his lips together. He looks like he’s about to say something, so Shiro waits. Ten seconds pass, and then Shiro realizes his hand is still on Keith’s shoulder. He drops it immediately, trying not to think about how large his hand looks when it sits besides the curve of Keith’s neck.

“Well,” Shiro runs the hand through his hair, trying not to look too nervous. “Say hi to your girlfriend- er, partner, for me.”

Keith says nothing to that, just stares at Shiro with his eyes squinted and— fair, it’s a pretty weird thing to say especially since Shiro has only seen his partner from a distance. They haven’t even met.

Shiro decides the best thing to do now is extract himself from the situation with whatever dignity he has left, so he starts to step back slowly. He looks over his shoulder to see if any cars are coming, and gives one last wave to Keith.

“I’ll see you around!” he says, trying to sound chirpy, and Keith raises a hand. He still looks a little confounded. Which, if Shiro was in his position, he supposed he’d be too. Shiro turns on his heel and picks up his jog again, ears burning as he hits the ground again with a fast pace.

 

* * *

 

 

“It’s okay to be hopeless, sweetheart,” his mother coos, and Keith groans from where his head is buried in his arms. He’s glad Romelle’s taken her dinner in front of the television and isn’t bearing witness to the fact that he’s currently having a crisis.

Krolia had asked him how his day went as they sat down for dinner, and Keith had just given a grunt in reply. She had prodded him a little, mostly by giving a “Is that all?”, and Keith had inadvertently ended up spilling about how he had ran into Shiro in the morning. And how he found out that Shiro thinks that Pidge is his romantic partner. And that he hasn’t told Shiro yet that he’s not Romelle’s dad.

He had also told her about how he hung out with Shiro just a little at his grandparent’s house. His mother has been relentless in teasing him about having a crush, even though he tries to tell her it’s not _that_ deep. Probably.

At least he hasn’t told her that he had haphazardly stacked his tools and had accidentally dropped them, all while being distracted by Shiro jogging down the road. He also hasn’t told her that he actually had been on the verge of asking Shiro if he wanted to get coffee, when Shiro dropped the girlfriend remark.

“I’m not hopeless,” he says, voice muffling into the light wooden kitchen table. His grilled salmon sits on the plate beside him, forgotten. Kosmo’s curled at his feet, keeping a keen eye out for any dropped food. “‘M just stupid.”

“I don’t see why you can’t just tell him Pidge isn’t your girlfriend,” Krolia says, nudging Keith’s leg from under the small table. Keith raises his head and gives her what he hopes is an incredibly bleary look to her.

“I don’t want to assume he’s interested,” Keith informs her. “I don’t know if I can handle rejection from someone who looks like that.”

“You don’t have to tell him _why_ you’re clearing it up, all you need to do is tell him you’re clearing it up. And anyways,” Keith makes a face as his mother speaks, and it seems to amuse her more. “He’s lucky to have you interested.”

“You’re saying that because I’m your kid,” he accuses, and his mom shrugs and forks some more mashed potato into her mouth. “I don’t even know how I’d approach him.”

“Maybe you should wait till your dad comes home tomorrow,” she says. “He’ll have some good advice for you.”

Keith’s dad will give him a long lecture on self-confidence, will try to convince him to grow out the stubble he knows Keith can’t really grow to begin with, and will tell him in all seriousness that his worth as a man rests on the respect that he treats others with. He’ll also over-spray Keith with his own cologne, give him some corny pickup lines and tell him he’ll have better luck if he cuts his hair or at least trims his bangs.

It’s going to be as embarrassing as it was the first time he did it, on the day that he and Krolia had dropped Keith off to his first-year dorm building at the beginning of the school year. Keith hadn’t been able to wash the smell of juniper and firewood off of him for days.

Keith lets out another long suffering groan, and his mother laughs at him, loud and clear like a bell. He puts his head down on the table again so that he can wallow like he’s fifteen again and has a crush on the fry cook at the local burger joint. No matter how grown he gets, having to acknowledge his own feelings is an experience extremely reminiscent of a cat biting a slice of lemon for the first time.

Kosmo must either sense his distress or that he’s not finished his dinner, because he starts to lick at Keith’s ankles. Keith twitches at the tickling sensation before relaxing, and a few seconds later, hears his mother pushing her chair back from the table. It’s followed by her fingers carding through his messy hair and scratching his scalp soothingly.

“It’ll work out,” Krolia says, and Keith makes an indistinguishable sound. Kosmo, realizing no one’s going to pawn their dinner off to him, stops licking Keith’s feet and rests his head on top of them instead. The sigh the dog lets out resonates deeply with Keith.

 

* * *

 

 

After work, Shiro stares at the business card still sitting in his wallet.

He’s taken, Shiro tells himself. Shiro’s not a homewrecker, and he has no intentions of starting now.

But Keith also does the landscaping for his grandparent’s front yard. Granted, it was only once, but Shiro’s sure that his grandfather mentioned something about wanting to lay down stone steps in the front yard. He thinks it’d make a great surprise gift for his grandparents, and Keith seems to be capable enough of carrying out the task.

Shiro is too, but he shoves the thought out of his mind as he pulls out his phone to punch in Keith’s number. He knows he can also just tape the card to the refrigerator like his grandmother does with all the other ones, but he doesn’t want to lose this number.

Just in case.

 

* * *

 

 

Ever the dutiful son, Keith goes to pick his dad and his dad’s friends up from the airport as they return from their Vegas trip. It’s easy to spot Alfor’s towering figure and stark white hair in the crowd. Keith waves, Alfor catches his sight, and hauls the other two men over. Alfor and Holt are both in very loud floral shirts, and Keith’s glad that the man who is most clearly related to him has decided to dress down in plain jeans and a leather jacket.

The first place Alfor, Sam Holt, and Keith’s dad want to go to is the bar. Keith asks them if they have anywhere else they’d rather be; say, their own home after spending two weeks travelling through the Mojave and then camping out in Vegas for four days. However, the three of them are already a little tipsy and eager to get moreso. He doesn’t have any early morning jobs the next day, so Keith shrugs and lets them pile up in the back of his truck.

His father sits shotgun. He ruffles Keith’s hair, and spends the ride telling Keith about how he and Alfor had won a karaoke competition for best romantic duet, but hadn’t been able to figure out who would take the trophy home. They’ve decided to snap it in half and store one in each of their suitcases and to Keith’s horror, he’s informed that it’s the same Marvin Gaye song he was conceived to. He tries to put a moratorium on all conversation in the car till they reach their destination, and no one listens to him.

Sal’s bustling for a Wednesday night, but Holt knows the owner and Alfor’s daughter works there so it doesn’t take too long for them to get a booth in the corner. They crowd around the table and Keith orders the three of them a round of Jim Beam and gets himself a pale ale to tide him over while they tell him about their trip. It had been to celebrate Alfor’s birthday and Holt’s birthday because they both occurred within a week of each other, and Holt enthusiastically takes out his phone to show Keith pictures of his dad red-faced and clearly losing at the blackjack table.

“Don’t tell my lady,” his dad says, smiling into his glass of bourbon and Keith rolls his eyes. Hokey pop-country plays over the speakers of the bar, and Holt gets them the next round. Keith just grabs a water because he knows if his mom has to make the trek out to pick the four of them up, he’s not going to hear the end of it.

The three men don’t feel like leaving, still riding out their vacation high in the bar so they hang out for a while, sharing stories. They make Keith swear under oath that he won’t tell Colleen about Holt getting so drunk and overheated that he came out of a bathroom at the Panda Express on the strip in nothing but his underwear. Apparently Keith’s dad almost did the same, until he remembered through a boozy haze that he can never hide anything from Krolia.

Eventually, the conversation turns to Keith. Holt asks him how’s the business and how Pidge’s holding up her end; it’s picking up the pace and she’s streamlined their invoicing process during their lunch break yesterday. Alfor asks him he’s grown any taller, despite Keith being in his twenties, and Keith tells him with a straight face that he’s grown two inches. In no world does it qualify as a good joke but the men are terribly drunk, and Alfor reaches across the table to clap his shoulder and give him a congratulations.

Throughout this whole discussion, Keith’s dad is unnervingly silent. He watches them talk with amusement, but he sits and sips his drink without saying a word. It makes the back of Keith’s neck prickle, and after five minutes, he gives in and turns on his dad.

“What?” he prompts, and his dad just stares back at him. There’s a twinkle in his look, and it takes Keith a moment to recognize it. It’s the same one that has populated his mother’s eyes recently, one that she gave him this morning when he said he’d pick Romelle up after school on Friday. Keith narrows his eyes at his father and shakes his head.

“Don’t”, he warns, and therein lies his mistake because the reaction is instant.

Keith’s dad pointedly places his glass on the table, and Holt and Alfor both lean in. Keith won’t be surprised if his mom has filled his dad in completely; he’s pretty sure they talk more when one of them’s travelling than they do when they’re both home.

“I’ve heard you got a crush,” Keith’s dad begins with the same amount of seriousness he did when he had given Keith The Talk. It’s mildly mortifying and Keith tries his best not to turn red. “And that you need help.”

“I don’t need help,” Keith replies, knowing it’ll be fruitless to try and counter the first point. His dad raises an eyebrow, and claps Keith on the back before ruffling his hair.

“Your mom told me you were having some trouble,” his dad reiterates, and Keith makes an exasperated noise and tries to push his dad’s hand off.

“I’m not,” he says petulantly, and he’s not a fan of the peanut gallery chiming in with a, “It’s normal to still be awkward at your age” and “Even Matt still has this problem” because he’s decidedly not having troubles. He’s got a handle on it.

“It’s okay son,” his dad says and Keith cringes because every time he becomes _son_ instead of _Keith_ , something exceptionally embarrassing will follow. “When I first saw your mother, it was quite the overwhelming experience.”

Holt snorts while Alfor hums in agreement, and Keith feels his ears turning extremely red extremely fast.

“The thing with dealing with beautiful people-” his father begins, and Keith abruptly gets up from the table.

“I’ll get us our next round,” he says quickly before shuffling out of the booth, and leaves to the sound of his father and his friends laughing.

It’s loud enough to be heard over the din of the bar and the ringing song about the wonders of dating a country girl. Keith tries to shield his face from onlookers as he shuffles between crowded tables and approaches the bar. He elbows in between two patrons and leans forward to look for the bartender, but sees she’s already busy with a few clients.

She looks up, catches his eye and nods when he waves, so Keith angles himself sideways so that he’s not squeezing in between people. It takes only a few minutes till Allura’s come over, and she’s already holding four glasses of bourbon neat. She sets them down on a tray for Keith, and he raises an eyebrow.

“How’d you know who I’m here with?” he asks, digging out a couple of bills from his wallet. “Keep the change.”

“High-roller,” Allura teases, and then tips her chin up behind Keith. “Our dads laugh obnoxiously loud. It’s kind of embarrassing.”

“At least you don’t have to sit with them,” Keith points out, and Allura snorts. “I’m serious. I think the sun got to them.”

“Just drop them home next time,” Allura says, and Keith shakes his head.

“ _Y_ _ou_ try saying no to them,” he says, and Allura laughs and leans over to pinch his nose before she pats his cheek and drifts over to the next customer.

Keith grabs the tray and starts, when he hears a familiar voice saying “ _excuse me_ ,” and feels someone trying to slot in beside him. It jostles him but Keith’s got enough experience that he manages to steady the tray in between him and the solid body that’s slid into the already minimal space Keith has.

For a second, Shiro looks as surprised as Keith feels. Keith wonders faintly whether or not this was planned, but can’t pinpoint who would plan this to begin with. It’s not embarrassing enough to be schemed by anyone he knows, so he just chalks it up to his life just being like this.

“Hey!” Shiro says, blinking out some surprise before he grins wide at Keith. Keith feels something in his heart light up at the sight of a perfectly-structured jaw and rumpled white hair and he desperately tries to stomp it down so he doesn’t smile like an idiot.

“Hey,” Keith replies, maybe a little too loudly. “What brings you here?”

“Co-workers wanted to take me out,” Shiro replies. “I’m still new to a lot of parts of town.”

“Ain’t missing anything here,” Keith says, and Shiro laughs.

“Here with friends?” Shiro asks, and Keith shakes his head.

“My dad,” he says, then frowns to himself. “It’s not as lame as it sounds. I picked up him and his friends from the airport and they wanted to come here.”

“Sounds fun,” Shiro replies, and the corner of Keith’s mouth twitches. He leans forward a little, and Keith mirrors the action so that he can hear him better. “Hey, if you want, you can swing by my table for a bit. We’ve got a couple of pitchers.”

Keith very, very much wants. He’s ready to ditch his dad and his friends and leave them at the mercy of having to call Krolia to come pick them up. Shiro smells sweat mixed with some sort of crisp, fresh-scented cologne that probably comes in a soft, translucent blue bottle. It doesn’t help that Shiro looks like a model too, with a plain white t-shirt stretched across his broad chest and dark jeans wrapped around his muscular legs. He’s a little flush like he’s already been drinking, his eyes over-bright.

“I, uh,” Keith starts, stops. Makes eye contact with Shiro and licks his lips unconsciously. Shiro does the same and Keith can feel all his higher functions start to shut down. He’s not quite sure what he was about to ask, and his brain starts grasping wildly for whatever line will be merciful enough to make itself known. “I don’t want to impose.”

“You won’t,” Shiro’s mouth stays parted after he replies, and Keith suddenly realizes that he’s made no move to hide the fact that he is very much checking Shiro out. He’s never been the type to be obvious but he can’t help it— it was bad enough before he had gotten to know the man, but now that he does, the effect of his presence is devastating.

And Shiro’s looking at him too, grazing his eyes across Keith’s face like it’s something to look at. Keith thought he had imagined it at Shiro’s grandparents’ house, but there’s no doubt now in the way that Shiro looks at him. Not that Keith can spot anyways; Shiro’s eyes seem like they’re burning in the best way, and Keith’s pinned.

They hold each other’s gaze for a moment, and suddenly Shiro snaps his mouth shut. His expression does a complete change. It goes from warm and open to closed off as he gives a tight smile to Keith instead. The moment falls off fast and Keith blinks, a little surprised. He suddenly realizes he’s still holding onto a tray of whiskey glasses, and that they’ve splashed around a little from the movement. But by the look on Shiro’s face, whatever was there has vanished.

“Okay, well,” Keith says, and slides one hand under his tray so that he can stick his hand up and wave goodbye. The angle is odd but he tries to manoeuvre, and kind of sticks his hand towards Shiro’s face. “See you around.”

Shiro squints at Keith’s palm like it’s asked him a weird question. Keith knows he should drop it, but his brain has packed up and left the station a long time ago. Slowly, Shiro raises his hand, and then gives Keith a high-five.

“See you around, bud,” he says, the _bud_ upticking in the end like he’s unsure about whether or not he and Keith are buddies.

The word kind of feels like a mallet over the head, so Keith just nods and starts to back away. His mother’s words, as well as Pidge and Romelle’s start to ring in his head as he looks at Shiro, and then a dim, three-watt light-bulb goes off in his head.

“By the way,” Keith says, and the casualness of his own voice is so painfully forced that it’s hard for him to not wince. “Pidge and I aren’t together.”

“Oh,” Shiro blinks. “You broke up? I’m sorry to hear that.”

“No,” Keith shakes his head. “We were never together. When I said partners, I meant business partners.”

Shiro looks expressionless, so Keith gives an awkward smile and says, “Pidge got a kick out of it. Said she’s offended anyone thought her standards were that low.”

Keith’s not quite sure what to expect as a reaction, seeing as he wasn’t planning to tell Shiro this on a crowded night at Sal’s. It’s somehow still extremely disappointing to see Shiro’s face remain blank as he looks at Keith. There is no sudden reaction, and Keith’s monkey-brain daydream of Shiro immediately drawing close and wrapping his chiselled arm around Keith remains woefully unfulfilled.

“Alright,” Keith says, and realizes the hand that received the high-five is still hovering up. He maneuvers it into an awkward salute. Keith thinks he might have read the situation wrong. Maybe there hadn’t been a moment to begin with, and Keith had been reading way too much into what was actually just a natural progression of events. “I’ll see you around.”

Shiro gives an incredibly half-hearted wave ever, and Keith turns on his heel, trying not to look disappointed.

  
  



	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long! Just as a forewarning, my high-school was renowned for how incredibly lame the dances were.

It’s bright and early Thursday morning and Shiro’s temples are throbbing. The science, math, and tech departments had gotten called in early for a meeting that started and ended in less than ten minutes. He’s now got an extra half-hour left to sit and wallow in the staff room before he has to head to class and pretend his head’s not trying to cleave him in half.

“It’s like Slav knew we were trying to have fun last night,” Matt groans from beside him on the couch, cold water bottle pressed to his forehead. As much as Shiro loves to blame the crotchety vice-principal for any and everything -as does the rest of the staff-, Slav _had_ emailed them about the meeting on Monday and they hadn’t made plans till the afternoon of.

Lance grunts from the armchair he’s sitting on,head tipped back. One of the gym teachers passing by flicks him between his brows,and Lance barely reacts. He gives Hunk a half-hearted smack on the wrist in retaliation but even _that_ looks like it drains whatever little energy he has left.

“Not all of us were having fun,” Lance says, and raises his head to look at Shiro. “Halfway through you looked like you wanted to die.”

“That’s just my face when I drink,” Shiro says, putting in minimal effort to make the lie believable. Matt snorts from beside him before wincing at the action.

Matt and Lance had both taken it as a personal offence when yesterday on lunch, Shiro had told them that he had never been to Sal’s. It’s apparently a rite of passage for anyone over twenty-one in town, so they had shoehorned him into going out that very night. It was part because they wanted to initiate him and part because if they had three people they could get a booth, and pitchers were half off.

It had been a fun outing for the first half, and Shiro had managed to pack away a lot more alcohol than he had in a long time. He blames this for why he proceeded to act like an unsocialized idiot when he ran into Keith; but he knows the mistake he had made long pre-dated him gaping at Keith at a bar like a startled fish.

Shiro had initially thought he had been having a drunk hallucination when he first saw Keith. He had gone up to the bar looking for water before he veered into puking territory, and had completely forgotten said water when he ran into the other man. After Keith had left, the embarrassment had been too great for Shiro to fall back into a good mood again. He tried to revive it with a couple more pints but, having clearly learned nothing in college, more alcohol only further exacerbated the sadness.

Foolishly, Shiro had held onto some hope that Keith might come by the table at one point during the night. He knew he should be celebrating the fact that his crush wasn’t taken, but all Shiro could focus on was how his brain had shut down midway through the interaction. His hand still tingles with the embarrassment of going in for a high-five when Keith was just waving and Shiro thinks it’ll take years before he recovers.

“That’s why you don’t drink water in the middle,” Matt says as he rolls the cold bottle down his face. “Sobering up is for chumps.”

“Maybe it’s because he talked to Keith,” Lance pipes in. “That always makes me feel depressed.”

Shiro makes a non-committal sound at this, before it clicks into his head.

“Wait,” he pauses. He glosses over the fact that his colleagues were watching him to begin with, because they were only twenty feet away from the booth. Shiro’s sure they didn’t see his misplaced high-five otherwise they would have never let him hear the end of it. “How do you know Keith?”

“We all grew up together,” Matt replies while Lance says, “He’s the worst.”

Matt rolls his eyes and waves his hand in Lance’s direction, flipping him off.

“Don’t listen to him,” Matt says. “Lance just hates him because he thinks Keith stole his high school prom date.”

“No,” Lance says, and suddenly he’s got more energy in his voice. “I hate him because I _know_ he stole my prom date.”

“You picked them up in a station wagon,” Matt says flatly. “He came to prom on a motorcycle.”

“Which makes him a dick,” Lance says firmly before he turns to Shiro. Shiro squints at him— if Lance went to highschool with Keith, he’s older than Shiro had pegged him for. “How do _you_ know Keith?”

“Uh,” Shiro pauses and thinks for a moment. His coworkers are nice but if they know Keith, he doesn’t want to tell them that their friend was the one who yelled at him, mostly because the two of them like to regularly make fun of the so-far-anonymous father who stormed into the parent-teacher interview. “He did some work for my grandparents’ place. He’s a nice guy.”

“Sure is,” Matt says, leaning into Shiro’s space. Shiro leans back but Matt hovers where he is. It might be less out of being suave and more because he looks like any extraneous movement might kill him. “You guys looked like you were getting pretty intense back there.”

Shiro barely stops himself from blurting out a, “You saw?” and instead relegates himself to a “What do you mean?” as his ears heat up. “We were so far away.”

“Keith likes to think he’s mysterious and hard to read,” Matt says. “But I’ve grown up around him and once you know him, you can read him like a billboard. He was clearly checking you out.”

Shiro presses his lips together. Opens his mouth to say something, but his mouth doesn’t want to function. He’s a grown man, he tries to tell himself. A grown man with a juvenile crush, a voice in his head reminds him. Matt grins, says “ _nice_ ”, and tries to sit back up.

“He was definitely trying to get in your space,” Matt starts, and words are still hard for Shiro. “I haven’t ever seen him look so into someone.”

Shiro shakes his head and wills himself not to go red. It’s a futile attempt, mostly because his body is too busy trying not to wither from his hangover to pay attention to anything else.

“You were drunk,” he tries to inform Matt. “You could barely see at all.”

“I had my contacts in,” Matt insists. “I saw perfectly fine.”

“Can we stop now?” Lance groans, placing a palm over his eyes. “Talking about Keith like that has made my headache worse.”

“A great idea,” Shiro agrees, and pushes Matt away when he leans in again with a conspiratorial look. “Also, I don’t think he’d be into me anyways.”

Matt frowns at this and even Lance moves his palm to stare at Shiro from out under it.

“What do you mean?” both of them ask in unison, and Shiro rubs his hand down his face before he speaks.

“I high-fived him and called him bud,” Shiro says in all seriousness. Matt and Lance look at him, then look at each other before letting out a sharp burst of laughter. “What?”

“What’s the big deal about that?” Lance asks, and Shiro finds that he’s suddenly having trouble maintaining eye contact.

“I also thought he had a romantic partner,” Shiro says. “And he clarified that he didn’t, after I high-fived him. And I didn’t say anything, so he just left.”

Shiro hadn’t said anything because right after his palm made contact with Keith, the mortification that Keith didn’t actually want a high-five had paralyzed him. The clap of their hands had been resonating through his brain, thus delaying any normal reaction he would have to being told that the guy he’s feeling sweet on is not dating anyone. Shiro has made a vow to never drink again because he still can’t think of a rational reason as to why he would think Keith was going in for a high-five.

“That’s rough buddy,” Matt says sympathetically, putting his hand on Shiro’s shoulder. “But who the hell did you think was his girlfriend? Not his mom, right? I know she’s hot but-”

“God, what?” Shiro blinks and assures himself that the girl he thought Keith had been dating definitely did not look related to Keith. “No, it wasn’t his mom. It was the person he works with. Pidge, I think?”

He’s met with silence at this. Matt and Lance both look owlishly at Shiro for a brief moment before Matt opens his mouth. There’s a five second lag between the action and any sound.

“Pidge?” Matt repeats. “Hair like mine? About the size of a garden gnome?”

“I saw her from a distance,” Shiro says. “But yeah. When he dropped by to do work, he called her his partner. And- I uh, thought he meant romantic partner.”

And at that time, Shiro also started to have a mini crisis over being attracted to a taken man. Shiro’s yet to find a source to blame for his romantic failings, so he has to take up the painful burden of bearing the responsibility on his own. He reasons that he’s been too busy doing other important things in life, but he’s really feeling the sting of his shortcomings at the moment.

He notices that Matt and Lance are still silent.

“What?” he says, a little defensive with the weird way they’re looking at him. A beat passes, and then Matt and Lance both burst out into braying laughter. “ _What_?”

“You thought he was dating my sister?” Matt wheezes, and Shiro’s eyes widen.

“Your sister?” Shiro says quietly, and Lance snickers as Matt pretends to wipe a tear from his eye.

“She’s going to get a kick out of this,” the laughter’s not quite left Matt’s voice. If Shiro thought he had felt mortification before, he was so, _so_ wrong.

By some good grace, the first morning bell rings loud, cutting them off. Shiro jumps to his feet, knowing Matt and Lance are going to lag behind like always. The look that they give Shiro as he makes his hasty exit is way too knowing.

 

* * *

 

Keith would not call himself a very dramatic person. He really wouldn’t— he appropriately reacts to situations as needed. Never more, never less. So he’d really appreciate it if Pidge would focus again on the mountain of paperwork they have to log and digitize for their business, instead of focusing on making fun of him.

“Do you have his number?” she asks as the flatbed scanner hums beside her. “Do you want me to get it? Or is that too socially strenuous for you?”

They’re at the dining table of his house, and they wouldn’t really have been talking about this if Keith’s dad hadn’t told his mom who laughed about it on the phone with Colleen while Romelle was eavesdropping.

Pidge made it to his house before he did because he was varnishing Iverson’s deck for free, and the two of them had decided to gossip. Not only has she found out about what happened at the bar, she’s heard it with all the amusing commentary that Keith’s dad loves to provide for these anecdotes and has more fuel for the fire. Keith’s long since accepted that he’s going to be the butt of all their jokes. He’s just not happy about it.

“Don’t talk to me,” Keith grumps, squinting at two near-identical bills and seeing which one goes to which neighbour of two semi detached homes. A balled up piece of paper hits his forehead, and he looks up to frown at Pidge. “What?”

“Stop acting like an embarrassment,” Pidge says in a voice oddly reminiscent of her father as she arranges a row of receipts to log. “Just ask him out. He’s probably very into you.”

“We don’t know that,” Keith says as diplomatically as possible. The ‘ _I’d rather die than ask anyone out, specifically anyone this hot that I’ve had_ so _many awkward run-ins with’_ is implied.

“ _We don’t know that_ ,” Pidge mocks, an unreasonably brave act for someone who has to get a pep-talk before each first date. “Unbelievable. Even Matt asked me about it, and it takes him so long to remember people’s personal anecdotes.”

Keith glares at Pidge, and she goes back to updating their expenses for the month on her laptop. While she’s not looking, he ducks his head and mumbles something under his breath. It’s extremely childish and explicitly done so that Pidge can’t hear but he can still pretend he got the last word. Unfortunately, she does hear him and lobs him with another crumpled up receipt. He really hopes she’s logging them properly before throwing them at him.

“Say that again,” she demands, and Keith heaves a sigh out of his nose. There’s no point in denying her, because he can already see her reaching for another receipt.

“I said I don’t think he’d be into me anyways,” Keith says. “It was so awkward at the bar, like he wanted to run away from me. And also he thinks I’m Romelle’s dad.”

“And what’s stopping you from clearing that up?” Pidge looks unimpressed, and Keith wonders if there’s ever going to be a possibility of everyone not being in his business.

“How am I gonna do that?” Keith grunts, shoving a few papers in a manila folder. They like to pretend they’re extremely organized and that they won’t be scrambling for their year-end. “I don’t want to hunt him down.”

“Let me ask Matt,” Pidge suggests and Keith makes a face.

“No,” Keith shakes his head. “He’s going to rope in Lance, and they both get so weird about anything they do together. Ever.”

It’s unspoken that while Keith’s proficient in a lot of aspects of his life, initiating romantic relationships is not one of them. His last partner had to ask him out three times before he realized that they were asking him out in _that_ kind of way.

The last time _he_ had built up courage to ask someone out, they had blinked in surprise and then proceeded to both apologize profusely and make multiple weird excuses for rejecting him. It had been extremely awkward, especially because up til he had been turned down, Keith had thought they would be a sure thing. Keith withers at the thought of going through the same thing with Shiro.

“Well if you’re not going to do something, someone has to,” Pidge states and Keith picks up one of the crumpled balls. He throws it back at her, and she gives him an unimpressed look as the paper slides off her face.

“No one has to do anything,” Keith says, cheeks tingeing pink. Pidge squints at him, before rolling her eyes.

“Whatever,” she replies, and it’s really not as reassuring as Keith would like it to be.

* * *

 

When Matt and Lance first took him under their wing, Shiro was grateful. He’s been told he’s charming but it’s hard for him to make friends that genuinely have in interest in hanging out with him. They’ve taken him into their fold immediately and without question, and Shiro has to remind himself that he cherishes their friendship.

“And why is this a bad idea?” Lance demands. Shiro _really_ has to remind himself that he cherishes their friendship.

“How is that romantic to begin with?” Shiro asks, because it still doesn’t make sense in his head.

They’re in the staff room again, mercifully off lunch duty. He had asked them how their days had been going, and they had immediately launched at him with some odd hare-brained plan for-- he’s not quite sure what for. It can’t possibly, genuinely be something to do with his crush on Keith, not unless they want to nuke any fledgling chance he has with him.

“It is because I said it is,” Lance says, jabbing a forkful of mac-n-cheese at Shiro. “And also, we’re down one chaperone.”

“Are you just using me to get us more chaperones?” Shiro asks bluntly, and Matt and Lance don’t even try to look repentant. They’ve been bugging him about Keith for the past couple of days; he thought they’d let up after the weekend but that is sadly not the case. “There’s nothing about having to watch over kids dancing that’s romantic.”

“It _could_ be,” Matt insists. “Just stick around five minutes after everyone leaves. I’m doing tech for it, I can hook you up.”

“With what?” Shiro asks, and Matt wiggles his eyebrows. It’s not the answer he needs, not an answer in general, and Shiro lets out an annoyed huff. He’s sure that the two of them see this as killing two birds with one stone, but their ideas are _terrible_.

“Asking someone to a dance is not romantic when it’s to chaperone a highschool event,” Shiro says indignantly, and Lance gives a non-committal shrug. “Why do you guys keep making fun of me if this is the best you could think of?”

“Well what’s the best _you_ can think of?” Matt’s tone is pointed, and he nods towards Shiro’s phone.

It’s sitting face down on the table because it keeps lighting up. Shiro’s grandparents haven’t realized yet they’re talking in the family group chat instead of a private chat, and some of the message previews has had Shiro come dangerously close to ‘accidentally’ throwing his phone out the second story staff-room window.

“You said you had his number, right?” Lance asks, and continues before Shiro can reply. “Then text him right now. Ask him out.”

“That’d be weird,” Shiro frowns. “And unsolicited. I’m not trying to play creepy client.” He hopes that the _I think you guys are perhaps not the best people to be giving romantic advice_ is implied in his tone.

“I don’t see any other option then,” Matt says gravely. He is wrong because there are in fact, many other options.

For example, Shiro’s been eyeing some flyers and thinks that his grandparents’ entire front lawn could do with a refresher. He could always invite Keith over for a quote, even though Shiro knows he’s probably not going to go with anyone else. He can invite him in for coffee again, they can chit chat, Shiro can do something relatively smooth like offer to take Keith out to a proper coffee shop to broaden the extent of his coffee experience with Shiro. He’s not sure what that relatively smooth thing will be, but Shiro’s sure he’ll think of something as the time comes.

...So maybe it’s not as well planned as Shiro thinks, but it’s definitely better than texting Keith with intention out of the blue when Shiro only got his number for business purposes. It’s _miles_ better than asking Keith to come chaperone a semi-formal with him. He voices as much, but Matt and Lance look certain of the fact that any idea that they have is the best idea.

“I’m not asking him to the dance,” Shiro says flatly. They don’t seem to buy it. “There are better ways.”

“Tell me when you think of them,” Matt replies sweetly, and Shiro decides to end the conversation once and for all by flicking a piece of broccoli at him.

 

* * *

 

“No way in hell,” Keith replies, turning the cube of chalk on the tip of his cue. Matt makes a noise of disapproval as Lance breaks and sinks a red-striped ball into one of the pockets of the table.

“You could watch over Romelle,” Matt tries, handing Lance back his beer as Keith circles the table. “She’d hate it and it’d be hilarious.”

Keith leans over the pool table and takes aim. Keith’s parents are out for the night and Romelle thinks it’s extremely uncool that her auto teacher and one of the school’s bio teachers are over, so she’s holed herself up in her room. Kosmo’s sitting and watching them play pool from beside the laundry machines, sprawled across the concrete floor of the garage.

“The first time you chaperoned a school dance you told me that you wanted to change careers,” Keith points out as he watches three solid-colored balls roll into the pockets. Lance mutters something about the table being uneven, as if all three of them aren’t collectively extremely shitty pool players.

It’s an unplanned hangout; Matt had texted Keith and asked him if he was free and less than two minutes after Keith said _yeah sure_ , his doorbell had rang. Keith had planned to turn them away because of the abruptness, but Matt had brought a six pack and Lance had brought steak nachos and Keith’s nothing if not a simple man.

“It’d be a favour to us,” Lance chips in. For some reason, he’s not shifted his position by much and it’s not a surprise when he doesn’t land anything. “We’re short one chaperone anyways. Coran says he’s got an important dental appointment he can’t miss that night.”

“He’s also one of the more senior teachers,” Matt adds. “So we can’t point out that we saw him buy tickets online during lunch to see the Arusians play live on the same night.”

Keith can think of a million different things he could be doing on a Friday night that doesn’t include supervising teenagers as they awkwardly dance with each other. He’s not a fan of clubs and dances in general, and the thought of having to pry apart kids if they get too handsy makes Keith shudder.

“Thanks,” Keith replies. “But no thanks.”

“Shiro’s coming,” Lance says suddenly, and Matt pushes him.”What?”

“We were gonna save that for last,” Matt chastises Lance, and Keith feels himself turn pink around the neck. He’s been blushing a lot more than he normally does lately, and he’s not sure how to feel about that.

“Why does it matter if he’s coming?” Keith asks, and both Matt and Lance give him a flat look. Keith pretends to not know what they mean by their unified expressions.

“I think this would definitely help you earn some brownie points with him. He’s chaperoning too.” Lance says as if he’s explaining a concept to a toddler. “Everyone and their dog knows you have a crush on Shiro.”

Keith should deny it. He should make a case that he’s an adult that doesn’t need any help from his friends. But he’s also half not here; instead, he’s thinking about Shiro in an awkward fitting suit, twirling Keith around the school gymnasium floor. Keith’s in the same purple zoot suit he was made to wear to his sixth grade dance, because even Keith’s daydreams show him no mercy.

“Shut up,” Keith says instead, and both Matt and Lance bark out a laugh. It’s mildly terrifying when they sync up like this.

“You’re not denying having a crush on Shiro,” Matt raises an eyebrow as Keith gives him the finger and goes back to the pool table. “I’m serious, come to this dance. You’re going to be a hero in his eyes.”

Keith scoffs at the dramatics, and shoves Matt out of the way so he can aim again. It’s not an opportune position, but Keith’s really just looking for a way to shut Matt up.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Lance says, and Keith’s close to poking both him and Matt in the forehead with his pool cue.

“You’ll take that as a no,” Keith grunts, and sinks nothing into the pockets of the table. When he straightens up, Matt and Lance both look like they’re trying to supress knowing grins.

“I said I’m not gonna do it,” Keith says firmly, but they do nothing to even pretend that they’re buying it.  


* * *

 

Shiro’s not the biggest believer in luck. It’s a given, since he’s not had much of it. But what he’s seeing right now, he’s going to take as a small sign of good fortune.

Yes, it’s quite possible that it’s less luck and more the fact that they live in a small area and Keith’s type of work makes him very visible to the general public.

And Shiro’s not going to lie— he’s been thinking about Keith a lot. No one else has grabbed his attention quite like Keith has, and the draw he has to him is inexplicable. On and off, Shiro’s been entertaining the notion that Keith might return that same level of attraction. A lot of his recent daydreams have been made up of them just falling together, because the thought of actually asking someone out makes his palms sweat.

Shiro’s far above asking Romelle about her dad; he’s not a creep and he has no intention to start being one. He’s decidedly not going to take up Matt and Lance’s help, because he feels like they are the antithesis of what wingmen should be. Shiro’s deeply considering taking the initiative of asking Keith out to coffee or something similar; he’s even ready to execute his poorly thought-out plan of inviting Keith over to take a look at his front lawn. The only problem is figuring out how to run into Keith or contact him without looking weird.

So to see him out on a front lawn in the distance on a pleasant weekend afternoon, driving a shovel through the ground and lifting up his tank top to wipe at his grimy forehead, seems to be a sign of luck. That luck is balanced out by the fact that the reason Shiro’s run into him is because Shiro is currently out for a walk around the neighbourhood with his grandmother. It’s less than ideal to run into your crush when your grandmother is going on about one of your third cousins who just got engaged while trying to drop her own poorly disguised hints.

It’s cool enough for a thin sweater but Keith must have been working for a while because after he wipes his forehead, he just pulls his tank top off completely. He’s shirtless and glistening with sweat under the afternoon sun, and his bright red truck is parked off the side of the curb.

Keith, now shirtless, pulls out a phone from his pocket and frowns at the screen. He tucks the end of his tanktop into the waistband of his jeans and shifts on his heels, turning away from them as he texts something with great concentration. Shiro gets a glimpse of a lean and defined back with a dark ponytail hanging down the centre, and feels his brain grind to a complete halt.

It’s so entrancing that Shiro doesn’t notice that his grandmother’s been trying to get his attention for the past thirty seconds. He finally snaps back to attention when he feels her nudging his side.

“Sorry,” he blinks. “What was that?”

“I said,” his grandmother starts, sounding a little amused. “Isn’t that our gardener?”

She raises her eyebrow and tips her chin towards where Keith is standing, still concentrated on texting and still shirtless by some stroke of luck.

“Landscaper,” Shiro corrects in the best attempt at an unaffected voice he can muster. It holds no water, because there’s an unnervingly knowing look that starts to make itself known on his grandmother’s face. He’s reminded oddly of how often he’d get caught by his grandparents whenever he lied as a teenager. Moreso when his grandmother hums in reply.

Keith barks out something in the direction of the truck and there’s something rustling before Pidge Holt sits up, book falling from her face and onto her lap. She throws a towel at Keith, and looks like she’s about to drop back down when she spots Shiro.

He feels his neck flush in embarrassment as she breaks out into a wide grin at the sight of him. He’s got no doubt that Matt’s told her that he thought she was Keith’s partner, and by the over-enthusiastic wave that she gives, he’s got no doubt it’s been the source of many jokes as well.

Keith turns to see who she’s waving at and— _oh_.

It’s one thing to see Keith distracted and shirtless and sweaty, but it’s a whole new game when Keith focuses his attention towards Shiro. He squints in the sun and raises a hand above his brow to get a proper look, and Shiro feels his grandmother grab him by the crook of his arm.

“Let’s go say hi,” she says, and Shiro’s about to protest but Keith raises his hand in greeting and he knows he’s trapped. Some form of embarrassment is starting creep up in Shiro and it’s happened so often in the past few weeks that Shiro doesn’t even remember how he lived in it’s absence.

“How’s it going?” Pidge calls out as they approach, hopping down from the bed of the pickup truck.

By the way that his grandmother has a death grip on his elbow, Shiro can tell there’s no hope in praying that maybe she wasn’t actually being observant and genuinely just wanted to go say hi to the guy who dug up a tree. To Shiro’s minor woe, Keith tugs his tank-top back on.

“I didn’t get a chance to thank you earlier for your work,” Shiro’s grandmother says, too much upbeat inflection in her voice for Shiro’s comfort. Shiro tries not to visibly react to it, tries to hide it behind flashing Keith a smile that hopefully doesn’t seem pained.

“No problem ma’am,” Keith replies good naturedly, wiping his hands down on his jeans. “I’m glad you liked it.”

“Yes, very much,” Shiro’s grandmother nods in response. Shiro opens his mouth and feels his grandmother step on his toes in a way that lets him know that he’s very much not going to get a word in. “In fact, we were thinking about getting some more work done if you’re available.”

She thinks she’s being slick, but Shiro can hear the gears turning in his grandmother’s brain. Since he moved back in, she’s offered to matchmake for him multiple times, mostly because he’s her only single grandkid. Shiro’s managed to divert that train multiple times, but he’s clearly not going to get the opportunity now. He curses himself for not just going ahead and calling Keith about the work beforehand.

“Sure,” Keith says, giving a polite smile as he gestures to Pidge. “My partner can come over and take a look tomorrow if you want.”

“Your _associate_ cannot,” Pidge cuts in and the emphasis on the word makes Shiro die a little. She flashes them a beaming smile. “However, Keith can come by and take a look. He’s more than capable of doing quotes on his own.”

“It’s a busy week,” Keith frowns at Pidge and Shiro feels a small amount of sinking in his gut. “I’m not free til probably Friday.”

“That’s fine,” Shiro’s grandmother replies enthusiastically. “Shiro’s free Friday night. I’ll let him know what needs to be done and he can talk to you.”

“Uh,” Keith starts, and he too is starting to turn a faint pink. Shiro wishes there was some way to telepathically convey to his grandmother that while Shiro’s probably doing a poor job of not acting like a lovestruck teenager, there’s no need to be too pushy. Shiro decides to take mercy on them both and interject into the conversation.

“I’m not free Friday,” Shiro says, the first word he’s been able to get into the conversation. “I’ve got to chaperone a school dance. Unless you think you could come by between five and five thirty and do it.”

“Yeah of course,” Keith says immediately. He pauses for a moment, before saying, “I mean yeah, if you want. I can definitely come take a first glance if you want. And I can drive you to the dance after, since I’m going too.”

There’s another silent moment before Keith tacks on a, ”If you want.”

For some reason, Pidge looks extremely amused.

“Oh yeah?” Shiro asks, not remembering seeing Keith’s name on the list of parent chaperones. “Is Romelle going?”

“Yep,” Keith nods, then digs his hands into his pockets. “That’s why I’m going. Gotta, uh, keep an eye on her.”

“She’s going to love that,” Pidge says dryly, elbowing Keith. “Does Romelle know yet?”

“She’ll find out when she sees me there,” Keith says in return, nudging Pidge. “She’s got no choice.”

“I’d do the same if I had a daughter too,” Shiro says, light and helpful because he knows that chaperoning high-school dances is on nobody’s list of desired activities.

“It’s okay,” Shiro’s grandmother beams and pats Shiro on the shoulder. “One of Shiro’s cousins got engaged to a woman who has two kids. It’s really no problem.”

A confused look flashes across Keith’s face, and Pidge coughs sharply and suddenly. Keith looks momentarily alarmed. He thumps her on her back as Pidge chokes out another cough, and she swats him away.

“Sorry,” Pidge wheezes. “Still working through a cold.”

“We won’t keep you any longer,” Shiro rushes out when he sees his grandmother open her mouth again, because he can quickly feel himself reaching his daily threshold for embarrassment. “We have to go anyways.”

“Come on Friday,” Shiro’s grandmother says firmly, looking slightly smug. “It’ll be good to start talking anyways.”

“Yes ma’am,” Keith replies, and there’s a brief look of nervousness on his face. Shiro groans internally, and starts to gently tug his grandmother away.

“I’ll text you,” Shiro says over his shoulder as his grandmother finally starts to walk, all too happy with herself. Belatedly, he adds, “About the quote.”

“I’ll just show up Friday,” Keith replies, sounding mildly amused. It doesn’t hold a candle to the way that there’s a slightly wicked smile that seems permanently plastered across Pidge’s face.

 

* * *

 

 

Regardless of what other people say, Keith feels like he’s generally always got a lid on things. He’s always shown some sort of self-control around people he’s had a crush on and he’s definitely not as easy to read as Pidge and her brother claim he is. This is how he knows he’s got it bad for Shiro, because he’s never done anything like _this_ for a crush before.

In Keith’s defence, he was unprepared for being spotted dirty and shirtless by his crush who is both incredibly hot and incredibly built. Keith’s pretty sure that Shiro’s bicep is the size of one of Keith’s thighs but he really can’t dwell on it for too long or else he’ll lose his mind. Pidge hasn’t stopped making fun of him all week for pigeonholing himself into chaperoning the dance, and no one else has either.

“You should take it,” Krolia says, trying very much to look like she’s serious and not teasing Keith. The corsage in her hand gives Keith a pitying look.

“You know I’m a chaperone, right?” Keith asks. “Please tell me you know this.”

“But you’re going _together_ ,” his mother insists, pushing the spray roses towards him.

Romelle’s date is still standing awkwardly by the fireplace, hands crossed in front of him as he stands an appropriate distance away from Romelle, who’s glaring daggers at Keith. She’s not happy with him for chaperoning, nor is she happy with Keith’s dad for silently staring her date down. Ryan is quiet and polite and takes it in stride, and has even let Krolia commandeer the soft white flowers he had bought Romelle for the semi-formal.

Keith takes some childish pleasure in knowing Romelle is suffering as much as he is; Krolia says she can have the corsage back if they let her take pictures and so Romelle glares at the camera and follows Krolia’s enthusiastic directions for posing. Ryan kisses her on the cheek for one of the pictures and Romelle beams at it for a moment, before she catches Keith’s dad giving a stern-father look. She rolls her eyes and tells the parents that she has to go now, that they can keep the corsage because they’re going to be late in picking up their other friends.

Once Romelle is gone, Keith’s parents try to shift the attention onto him. Keith’s dad tries to chase him with his cologne, ignoring the fact that Keith keeps squawking that he’s a _chaperone_. He threatens to move out at least five times before he finally leaves the house in his truck, his parents waving him off and loudly wishing him luck on his date.

All on the way to Shiro’s place, Keith’s extremely nervous. He tries to remind himself that this is not a date, that they are not actually going to a dance. Shiro might be extremely hot and Keith might have seriously considered bringing his motorcycle instead of his truck, but this is not a date. This actually might be the complete opposite of a date, because he can’t think of a more unromantic activity.

Keith’s official reasoning is that he’s only feeling nervous because his family and friends have made him this way. They’ve bothered him enough to make him antsy and he thinks he’s definitely validated in shifting off the blame for the butterflies in his stomach to someone else. It works for the few minutes it takes to drive to Shiro’s house, and Keith thinks he’s got a lid on it. Maybe it's less like a lid on a ceramic cookie jar and more like a lid on a pressure cooker, but it's a lid nonetheless.

Until he pulls up to the curb and puts his truck in park. It’s then that it truly slams into Keith that it feels like it _is_ prom night and that he’s here to pick up his date. Faintly in the back of his head, he remembers the corsage, but Keith drop-kicks the thought out of his brain before it becomes too invasive. It takes him another five minutes to wipe his sweaty palms on his jeans and mentally pep-talk himself before he finally gets out of the truck.

All that pep goes away as soon as Shiro opens the door. Keith thought he had dressed up enough in a pair of clean jeans and a dark red dress shirt; he looks neat enough to be at a dance and informal enough to clearly not be one of the students. Lance had given him a big lecture on it but Keith only processed the “just wear a nice dress shirt but jeans so that no kid asks you to dance because that is _scarring_ ”, and had ignored the rest.

Shiro, technically, is dressed semi-casual too. He’s got on black jeans and a soft grey sweater that stretches across his broad chest in a ridiculous way. Keith feels severely underdressed in his presence. Shiro smells like he’s freshly showered and looks domestic in the hottest way possible, and Keith wonders if he’s being dramatic by being rendered speechless.

“Uh,” Keith says intelligently. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Shiro’s eyes flit to the truck behind Keith nervously before he looks at Keith and gives him a quick smile. “Ready to go?”

“Oh shit, did I come too late?” Keith checks his watch— he’s only eight minutes later than he said he’d be, but he thinks he’d still have time to do a rough quote for whatever work Shiro’s family wanted done. Pidge is faster at these things, but Pidge isn’t the one holding a burning flame for a highschool math teacher, as she had put so succinctly.

“No, just-” Shiro starts, but there’s some muffled yelling in the background. Both of Keith’s eyebrows automatically raise.

“Is everything okay?” Keith asks, just as there’s a “ _Shiro! Bring him in!_ ” from behind them. He gives Shiro a bemused look, and Shiro has the expression of a man who has been suffering but has still managed to keep it beautiful.

“I uh-” Shiro winces as his names is called out again. “My grandparents seem to be under the impression that we’re actually going to a dance together.”

“Oh,” Keith replies, and Shiro presses his lips together.

“My grandma said she’s not letting us go till we get a picture together,” Shiro says, voice extremely sheepish. “So I think we should run while we still have the chance.”

“You’re not going anywhere!” Shiro’s grandma’s voice is a lot clearer now, and Shiro jumps where he’s standing as she comes up behind them. He looks monumentally embarrassed at this, and Keith would find this incredibly amusing if he didn’t also empathize deeply with the situation. If for any reason it had been Shiro picking him up, Keith’s parents would have been absolutely intolerable.

“My parents tried to make me take a corsage,” Keith says, throwing Shiro a lifeline and sinking any vestiges he had of being cool. “Let’s go take that picture."

“Good!” Shiro’s grandmother claps her hands together, and Shiro gives a long-suffering sigh as he steps aside and lets Keith in.

“I’m so sorry,” he says, and Keith shrugs as he toes off his runners. He’d definitely rather this than his parents try and tell Shiro to have their son home before eleven (or _else_ ) for their own amusement, despite the fact that Keith’s in his twenties.

“My date ditched me the night before for prom in highschool and I ended up not going,” Shiro explains as he leads Keith through the hallway. “So I think my grandparents are just making up for the fact that they couldn’t embarrass me then. Despite the fact that it was fourteen years ago.”

Keith has a hard time imagining anyone wanting to ditch someone as good-looking and nice as Shiro. “You got ditched?”

“The guy I was dating didn’t like that I wasn’t going to the same university as him,” Shiro shrugs. “So he dumped me the night before prom and cancelled our limo.”

“That’s rough,” Keith frowns as Shiro leads them into the living room.

“I got over it,” Shiro replies easily, stopping at the doorway. “But the rest of my family never forgives anyone who dumped me. You’re not allowed to say the name Adam in this household.”

He says the last bit in a conspiratorial whisper that elicits a short laugh from Keith.

“My family’s the same,” Keith laughs. “Very over-involved at any given opportunity.”

Shiro gives him a genuine smile this time, one in solidarity and one that makes Keith’s heart skip many beats. He mouths a quiet _thank you_ before he steps both of them into the living room.

Shiro’s grandmother is extremely excited to see the two of them. Shiro’s grandfather stands beside the fireplace, arms crossed over his chest with an expression eerily reminiscent of what Keith’s dad had been giving Romelle’s date. He shakes Keith’s hand unusually hard for a man that stands an inch shorter than him, and nods silently in greeting.

Keith nods as well, as Shiro tries to convince his grandmother that they don’t actually have enough time to get pictures outdoors as well. Keith catches a quick glimpse of a picture on the mantle; it’s of Shiro in an Air Force uniform. He’s got jet black hair and no scar in this image, and looks a lot leaner than the man standing a few feet away from Keith.

The man who’s currently trying to tell his grandmother that it’s okay, that they don’t need a last minute chauffeur, that they’re not actually going on a date, that they’re _adults_. By the way that Shiro’s grandmother is failing to suppress her laughing in between her sentences, Keith’s sure that Shiro’s grandparents are as meddlesome as Keith’s parents. Shiro throws his hand up in the air and his grandmother chastises him quickly, and Keith finds himself getting hustled in front of the fireplace.

“Again,” Shiro says out of the corner of his mouth. “I’m so sorry.”

Keith can’t find it in him to complain; he would be a fool if he did. Shiro’s grandmother makes them stand close, and Shiro places his hand in between Keith’s shoulder blades when she says they’re not standing close enough. Keith’s acutely aware of the amount of surface area said hand takes up, but tries not to think about it too much. He also tries not to think about how warm and solid Shiro is beside him, nor about how good Shiro smells, like fresh soap and pine. Keith really, really feels like he’s going to prom now and he’s glad that Shiro’s face is as flushed as his is.

“Are we done?” Shiro asks after his grandmother asks his grandfather to move further back because he’s blocking some crucial light. “We have to get there before the kids do.”

“How are you getting there?” Shiro’s grandfather asks. “What are you driving?”

“I brought my truck,” Keith replies, and feels Shiro twitch beside him.

“What kind of truck?” Shiro’s grandfather clears his throat and levels Keith with an thoroughly assessing look. It makes Keith nervous, while Shiro closes his eyes and sighs.

“None of this will be as bad as chaperoning,” Shiro says under his breath, seemingly more to himself than Keith.

“Uh,” Keith starts because Shiro’s grandfather is still giving him a look, but Shiro shakes his head and grabs Keith by the elbow, his hand encapsulating a healthy amount of Keith’s arm.

“We actually do need to go,” Shiro says, tugging Keith away. “If we miss Slav’s pre-dance pep talk, he’s going to chew my head off.”

“Give me your number so I can send you the pictures,” Shiro’s grandmother says, turning her phone towards Keith. He sees the most recent picture of him and Shiro, both of them fire-engine red. Keith looks like he’s wincing instead of smiling and Shiro looks like he’s waiting for the earth to open up and swallow him whole. Keith very much wants these pictures, but Shiro’s already hauling him towards the lobby.

“I’m so sorry,” Shiro rushes out as soon as they’re in the front seat of Keith’s truck. “I tried to stop them but they love doing stuff like this.”

“It’s fine,” Keith says, because it is. He would be terribly mortified if his parents had done this, but because it was Shiro’s grandparents, he’s mostly just equal parts charmed and embarrassed. “It’s still better than what my parents would have done.”

“Yeah?” Shiro says, raising an eyebrow as he clicks on his seatbelt.

“When I left, my dad was asking Romelle’s date for hard copy proof of his driving record,” Keith says, and Shiro snorts at that.

“Good,” Shiro replies. “He should. Teenage boys.”

Keith gives a responding laugh in agreement, one that Shiro mirrors. His laugh is low and gravelly and makes Keith feel warm to his core. “Well, ready for our date?”

Blessedly, Keith’s tone remains sarcastic enough that it hides the fact that his mouth just panicked and worked faster than his brain did. But Shiro gives another laugh, a brighter one this time and he turns towards Keith as he does it and then Keith’s brain starts to short-circuit.

 

* * *

 

There’s a sliding scale of how painful an experience is for Shiro, and it’s a large scale. One that’s very much threatening to tip right now.

Shiro’s been through a lot in his life but nothing in recent memory has been as excruciatingly painful as chaperoning a high-school semi-formal. He’s found that a career as a teacher has been a lot more engaging and interesting than he thought it would be, but this is definitely one of the low points. Shiro would rather be getting three simultaneous root canals than tell Griffin for the tenth time that he cannot dance as inappropriately as he is, regardless of the fact that his best friend’s his dance partner.

“This is the worst,” Lance says, and Shiro would be hard-pressed to disagree. Lance has his arms folded over his chest, and Shiro knows it’s his turn to tell Griffin off. Lance has already suggested that they drift away before Slav comes and bugs them about having too many chaperones in one section of the floor, and also so that they don’t have to talk to Griffin again. Unfortunately, Shiro’s already tried to casually stroll to another section— Griffin and his friends just seem to be everywhere.

Shiro gives a long-suffering sigh, and opens his mouth to bark out a reprimand over the music again. Griffin manages to catch it out of the corner of his eye and immediately releases his dance partner. His friends are still circled around them, catcalling with their phones up, and both James and Kinkade put their hands up with the most innocent faces they can apparently muster. Shiro rolls his eyes and Lance mimics retching as Griffin disappears into the crowd and Kinkade goes back to his date.

Which means that in an instant, Keith’s materialized two feet away from where Kinkade and Romelle have started to slowly sway. Shiro lost him to the crowd earlier on, and every time he’s tried to talk to him, Slav spots them and disperses them. He’s instated a rule with the chaperones that they need to spread out as much as possible, and has been doing his best to instate it in the most annoying way. It’s less that it’s put a dent into Shiro’s plans of attaching himself to Keith during the dance and more that it’s sucked any enjoyment out of the activity in general, because he can’t speak more than thirty seconds with any given coworker lest the reedy vice-principal come scolding out of the shadows.

Keith’s currently glaring Kinkade down while Romelle is glaring Keith down. He’s been playing over-protective dad with Romelle’s date and it’s apparently been annoying Lance too. Lance has been trying to glare at Keith whenever he sees him, but Keith’s too busy staring daggers into the back of Kinkade’s head to pay attention to him. It’s to the point that Lance has only made three jokes about the fact that Shiro came to the dance with Keith.

“Go talk to him,” Lance says, nudging Shiro’s side and jutting his chin towards Keith. Keith crosses his arms over his chest, and Shiro can see Romelle pointedly wear a blank face as a small bead of sweat forms on Kinkade’s temple. Shiro frowns at Lance and shakes his head.

“No, listen to me,” Lance insists. “Go talk to him right now and tell him to stop staring down Romelle and Ryan, otherwise he’s never going to be able to chaperone a dance again.”

“Most would consider that a blessing,” Shiro says dryly, but Lance has a point. As amusing as it is to see Keith stare down his daughter’s date, Kinkade’s a sweet kid. Shiro had been supervising in the cafeteria the day Kinkade had asked her out to the semi-formal, and had seen him wipe his hands eight times on his cargo shorts before he approached Romelle’s table.

“Slav’s coming,” Lance says, craning his neck. “I’d do it sooner rather than later.”

With that, Lance absconds into the crowd. Shiro hears a familiar nasal voice reprimand someone for singing along to the song too loud, and decides to move fast. Keith doesn’t notice him as he approaches, and startles a little when Shiro comes up beside him with a “Hey.”

“Hey,” Keith replies, looking up at Shiro. Romelle spots the temporary distraction and grabs Ryan by the hand, yanking him away before Keith can see. Keith does catch it, and is about to follow them but Shiro puts his hand gently against Keith’s back.

“We have to supervise _all_ the kids,” Shiro gives Keith a good natured smile while also looking out for Slav from the corner of his eye. “You’ve got nothing to worry about. He’s president of the A/V club and he won the state spelling bee.”

“I’m only doing it to bother her as much as she bothers me,” Keith says, and Shiro lets out a short laugh. Slav’s voice grows nearer, and Shiro knows they have to act fast.

“Are you thirsty?” Shiro asks, scanning the crowd as he tries to get a location on the vice principal. “Let’s grab some punch.”

Before Keith can say anything, Shiro’s pushing them through the crowd, away from Slav. There’s a long plastic table near where they were standing, but Shiro chooses the one at the opposite end of the dance floor. It’s only got a few kids around it, some that recognize him and give him a bright greeting before they make way for him. Shiro plucks two plastic cups from the stack on the table and sets them down, ladling red punch into each.  

“Very chivalrous of you,” Keith says as Shiro hands him a cup before picking up his own, and Shiro grins.

“What kind of date would I be if I didn’t get you a drink?” Shiro jokes, hoping it doesn’t have the undercurrent of desperation that he so very much feels. Keith snorts and though the general lighting of the dance is a soft purple, Shiro swears he sees Keith’s cheeks darken. He can’t tell for sure though, because Keith takes a large swig of the punch.

“When’s you grandmother going to send me those pictures?” Keith asks, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “I want to frame one of them.”

“Don’t tell her that,” Shiro says, shaking his head. “It’ll give her ideas.”

“I’ll bring a limo and a tux and a professional photographer when it’s prom,” Keith says seriously, and Shiro’s hand is occupied so he can’t quite give Keith a playful shove like he wants to. He hip bumps him instead, and some of Keith’s punch sloshes onto his hand. “Hey!”

“Sorry,” Shiro says, looking at Keith as innocently as possible. “I’m a little clumsy.”

“You’re just standing,” Keith grumbles and this time Shiro can see the smile he’s hiding when he takes another sip from his cup.

There’s a familiar flash of long blond hair that catches Keith’s attention, but before Keith can follow it and bug Romelle again, Shiro stops him.

“Keith,” Shiro says firmly, and Keith pauses from where he was clearly gearing up to launch towards Romelle. “We've got other kids to supervise.”

“We?” Keith raises an eyebrow, clearly itching to go stare down Kinkade again. “I thought the rules were no more than one chaperone per section. Isn't that what the vice said?”

“I think I need to keep an eye on you so that you don't bother the poor kid,” Shiro replies, draining the rest of the punch. “Also, the rule only applies when he's watching.”

“Irresponsible,” Keith deadpans, but he can't quite keep a smile off his face. It's rapidly becoming one of Shiro's favourite things about Keith; the smile is natural and a little crooked, like he can't help being caught somewhere between a smirk and a grin. It’s more breathtaking under the soft pink and purple light that washes over the room, and Shiro’s heart feels light.

Turns out, chaperoning is a little less dread-inducing with Keith. Once Shiro stops him from constantly looking for Romelle, Keith seems to fall into something more relaxed, something more appropriately exasperated with the fact that he's currently supervising a highschool dance. They drift around, and Keith runs a commentary under his breath that gets Shiro to laugh out loud a couple of times.

He's less making fun of the kids and more making fun of himself for being too old to understand a single thing going on, such as some dances or why a group of boys decided to wear suits that are the same shade of very specific yellow that matches Hunk’s headband. Shiro's acutely aware of Keith's presence, of how much space he occupies and how close he stands at any given point, shoulder brushing against Shiro’s. Shiro's been working hard not to think about how good Keith looks in the pressed red dress shirt otherwise he's pretty sure he's going to start daydreaming about it.

“This isn't all too bad,” Keith says idly, and Shiro shakes his head. Shiro had made the same mistake during one of the first dances of the year, and had gotten too comfortable. It won't take Keith too long to change his mind.

And sure enough, it takes only one idle stroll to come across two seniors dancing up on each other in a way more intimate manner than is allowed per the announcement Slav had made earlier in the day. Shiro had all this confidence and desperate teenage energy when he was young too, but having to witness it on the other end is nothing short of violently cringe inducing.

“I feel like I'm going to throw up,” Keith says under his breath and Shiro hums in approval. “Please tell me we can ignore this. I want to go bleach my brain.”

“This is why everyone hates chaperoning,” Shiro grimaces and takes a quick look around to see if there's a way out.

Luck strikes him hard, because he catches Lance's eye. Lance has stumbled upon the scene as well, and makes a face at the dancing teens. Thinking fast, Shiro immediately loops his arm around Keith's shoulders and tugs, quickly pulling them away from the situation. He takes one brief glance over his shoulder to see a look of extreme betrayal on Lance's face, one that doesn't abate even when Shiro gives him his most apologetic look before turning back to Keith.

“You’re welcome,” Shiro says once they’re a safe distance away, and Keith mimes vomiting. They see Lance again ten minutes later, and Lance looks like he’s lost a crucial part of himself. Keith waves at him, but Lance just levels them with a sullen look before he shakes his head and walks away. It reminds Shiro of a question that’s been on the backburner since Lance mentioned it.

“Lance told me you stole his prom date once,” Shiro says, and catches sight of Slav. Slav thankfully walks in the opposite direction before he spots Shiro and Keith. Keith frowns for a moment, looking at Shiro like he’s not quite sure what he’s talking about. “Something about how you came in on a motorcycle and he came in a station wagon.”

Keith looks confused for another moment before recollection crosses his face. He rolls his eyes and shakes his head, scoffing.

“I didn’t steal her,” Keith says, sounding amused. “I gave her a ride home because his car wouldn’t start and his family was out of town.”

“That sounds very Lance,” Shiro says and Keith nods.

“He keeps missing out the part where I gave him a ride home too,” Keith says. “I didn’t want to make more than one trip so I fit the three of us onto my bike. He’s just mad because she gave me a kiss on the cheek when I dropped her home and only gave him a pat on the back. He wouldn’t shut up about it for the rest of the year.”

That gets a laugh out of Shiro, a genuine one that Keith returns with his crooked smile. He’s glad he’s got more fuel to make fun of Lance now, because recently Lance has always had the upper hand when it comes to jokes. “Bike, huh? Do you still ride?”

“Oh yeah,” the reply comes almost immediately, and Keith raises an eyebrow again. This time, the action is a lot more deadly because Shiro starts imagining him in dark black leathers sitting astride a motorcycle that’s as red as his shirt. “Why, you wanna go for a spin?”

A second image comes to Shiro like a vision, of wrapping an arm around Keith’s waist as they zip through on the coastal highway under the warm morning sun. In this vision, their jackets match.

“Sure,” Shiro replies, hoping his voice comes out easy. For good measure he adds, “I used to have a Ducati but I sold it a couple of years ago. I still miss it though.”

“I have a spare helmet,” Keith shrugs, but cuts himself off when something in the distance catches his eye. Before Shiro can say or do anything, Keith sets himself in motion, walking with great purpose towards something. Shiro squints in the direction he’s heading and groans when he sees what caught Keith’s eye. Immediately, Shiro strides after him because a parent making a scene at a dance is the last thing he needs. The last thing anyone needs.

Romelle and her date are swaying, heads tipped close to each other. Shiro can see the gears turn in Kinkade’s head as he builds up the courage to kiss her and quickens his pace. He makes it in the nick of time and right before Keith reaches them, Shiro manages to intercept him by stepping in front of him. Keith’s too determined to notice until he walks right into Shiro, realizing Shiro’s presence as he bumps into Shiro’s chest.

“Hey,” Shiro says, looking down at Keith. Keith’s currently staring directly at Shiro’s chest, and Shiro can’t tell if he’s trying to bore a hole into it so that Shiro moves or not. “Remember what I said?”

Shiro expects a wide variety of reactions from Keith, including him stepping out to the side so that he can sneak around Shiro. He expects Keith saying gruffly that he’s just carrying out his paternal duty, like that one father of a right guard who tries to interrupt Hunk’s coaching at home games. What he doesn’t expect is Keith crossing his arms across his chest and downright _pouting_ like a petulant child.

“I just want to annoy her as much as she annoys me,” Keith says and Shiro blinks because he swears he hears a drop of whining in his voice. It’s a little bizarre coming out of a father, especially one who was painting quite the picture of being a badass biker a few moments ago. Though that last one might be less Keith’s fault and more on Shiro.

“No scaring the students with a stern dad display,” Shiro scolds gently. “I know she’s your daughter, but try to save the intimidation tactics for when he drops her home.”

Keith has another unexpected reaction to Shiro’s words. First, his eyes widen and he opens his mouth. It hangs there for a moment, no words coming out before he clicks it shut and presses his lips together. He stares unblinkingly at Shiro, and his mouth twitches like he’s trying to smile but quite hasn’t figured out how to do it yet. Keith’s face goes through approximately three more expressions before it finally settles into what Shiro recognizes as an incredibly sheepish one.

“I uh,” Keith starts, licking his lips. It looks nervous but Shiro’s drawn to it anyways. “I should have probably cleared this up earlier.”

Shiro feels mildly perplexed and it must be showing on his face, because Keith gives a cough.

“She’s uh,” Keith starts, pauses. Starts again, “She’s not my kid. She’s my cousin.”

She’s— oh.

Everything quickly grinds to a halt in Shiro’s head as he looks down at Keith, who’s got his hands up in front of him in apology. He’s not quite sure what to say to this, so he’s left there gaping like a fish.

“You called her your daughter when you yelled at me,” Shiro says faintly. And this isn’t really that big a deal; Shiro’s found out a lot stranger things about people before. But he can’t believe he’s been so completely wrong about a _second_ thing with Keith.

“She’s my cousin,” Keith repeats, and he doesn’t make eye contact with Shiro. “Definitely not my daughter.”

“Oh,” _Oh_. “But why-”

There’s a loud throat clearing from beside them, and the bottom of Shiro’s stomach falls out as Slav cuts into their conversation.

“No more than one chaperone in each area,” he barks at them, straightening out his tweed suit as he goes. “Hira is already here, so each of you have to go take up an empty section. We’re not here to socialize.”

“Yes sir,” Shiro says, and Slav waits and watches them with his hands on his hips. Shiro’s not quite sure how to convey to Keith that he wants to carry on this conversation afterwards while Slav is still here, but Keith saves him the trouble by nodding him and giving him a short salute.

“Still need a ride back?” Keith asks and Shiro nods as Slav clears his throat again. Keith puts his hands up again, backing off and turning on his heel, walking off to another area of the dancefloor. Shiro watches woefully as Keith disappears, and Slav hums in approval before he goes to tell off two students for play-fighting on the floor.

The rest of the dance goes by in a haze and for a majority of it, Shiro mulls over the fact that Keith is in fact not Romelle’s father. It makes sense now, why Keith looks unusually young for a father of a teenage daughter— it’s because he’s not. Shiro can only guess as to why he had stormed into the room pretending to be Romelle’s father.

Shiro spots Keith a couple of times, once in a heated argument with Lance. He can’t go over though because every time he so much as thinks about doing so, Slav strategically appears ten feet away. Shiro wonders if Slav’s got some kind of tracker on him. Frequently, Shiro wonders if this makes things a lot less complicated, and he doesn’t have the added awkwardness of crushing on a student’s parent. On one hand, things seem to be falling into place for Shiro. On the other hand, it seems to be coming at the cost of his dignity.

Matt joins him at the two thirds mark, taking a break from supervising the tech booth for the dance. He takes one look at Shiro’s face and laughs, thumping him on the back.

“You look like you just had a revelation,” Matt says, and Shiro shakes his head.

“Keith doesn’t have a kid,” Shiro says, and Matt nods along.

“That is correct,” Matt replies like it’s a well-known fact and given that he grew up around Keith, it probably is. Shiro’s the only one who was left in the dark about this, and he feels like the new kid all over again,

“You knew this?” Shiro asks anyways and Matt looks bemused as he responds.

“You didn’t?”

Right. Shiro had been hiding the parent-teacher interview incident from Matt and Lance, lest they take their clownery to the next level and rip on his crush. He thinks he’s going to be justified in telling the story now, just because it’s clear that the only person that’s going to get ripped on is Shiro.

“Remember that angry parent I told you about?” Shiro asks, and Matt hums. “That was Keith. I thought Romelle was his daughter.”

Matt stays silent for a second, and Shiro makes the mistake of preemptively feeling relief that maybe it’s not as embarrassing as he thought it was. But then Matt blinks, and bursts out into a laugh so loud and braying that it startles some of the students nearby. It’s a hearty laugh that gets students to stare, and Matt clutches his stomach as Shiro’s brows involuntarily pinch.

“It’s not that funny,” Shiro says, and this time he knows that he’s the one who both looks and sounds petulant. Matt wipes a non-existent tear from his eye before he bursts out into another peal of laughter that is quite obviously directed straight at Shiro.

“It absolutely is,” Matt wheezes. “You thought he was married _and_ with child?”

“That makes it sound like I thought he was pregnant,” Shiro protests. “He called her his daughter!”

“And you actually believed him?” Matt says incredulously, as if the answer isn’t obviously yes. Shiro’s not in the business of assuming people are too young to be parents. “I can’t believe you thought he was old enough to be a highschooler’s dad. He still looks like he’s a college freshman.”

Shiro mumbles something as Matt continues to laugh, breaking out into snorts and clapping Shiro’s back.

“What’s that, Mr.Shirogane?” Matt’s voice is dripping with amusement, and Shiro gives him a small shove while no one’s looking.

“I thought he just had her young,” Shiro grumbles, and Matt barks out another laugh. He ruffles Shiro’s hair like he’s a particularly good dog and pats him on his cheek.

“You are truly and utterly hopeless,” Matt says, and pauses. “Wait, does this mean you’re going to finally actually ask him out? Please tell me yes.”

Shiro decides to not dignify Matt with a response.

Even if he might be feeling a small surge of confidence.

* * *

 

Keith watches as the last of the students trickle out, leaving balloons and streamers and confetti in their wake. Romelle’s long gone, having escaped with Ryan in tow and a raspberry directed squarely at Keith. He knows he laid it on a little thick with the intimidation, and that Ryan is an extremely sweet guy, but Keith has approximately no regrets about it.

Especially now since he’s cleared things up with Shiro; he’s not married, he’s not the father of a student, and hopefully Shiro’s picked up on the fact that Keith’s both available and very, _very_ interested. He’s kind of sad that he didn’t get to hang out with Shiro for the rest of the dance and that’s how Keith knows he’s in deep. It’s a special kind of crush when it makes chaperoning a high-school dance tolerable.

“So how’d you find it?” Shiro asks, startling Keith as he comes up from behind him. He thumps Keith on the back, but his hand remains there, large and warm. “As exciting as they said it would be?”

“I want to scrub my brain,” Keith informs him, and Shiro laughs. Keith’s got to hear the sound a lot over the past few hours, and it’s become one of his favourites. There’s music still playing over the speakers but it’s quieter now without the crowds.

They haven’t turned up the lights yet, and Keith watches Lance shoo away the rest of the stragglers. They had gotten into a heated argument earlier, when Keith asked him why Lance was still telling people he stole his prom date and Lance asked Keith why he kept betting against Lance’s team on trivia night at Sal’s.

Lance had flicked Keith on the ear, an action that had been caught by one of the stodgy drama teachers, and they had gotten separated on the floor. Keith had spent the rest of the night by himself, body at the dance but mind somewhere light years away, churning up ways to ask Shiro out. He’s got more hard-won confidence now, feeling it a lot more than he had before.

Enough so that as the sounds of a guitar plucking into a new song starts to float over them, Keith turns on Shiro, who’s already standing incredibly close. He’s looked impossibly handsome all night long, silver hair reflecting the purple and pink light, sweater unrumpled and hair pushed back like he just walked out of one of Keith’s dreams. The hand he had on Keith has slid to his shoulder with the movement, and a full ten seconds pass before Shiro drops it off.

Keith’s spent a lot of time being an idiot so far, but this prolonged exposure to Shiro has been very inspiring and he doesn’t see any reason to pull his punches anymore. He should be asking him if he’s ready to go, he should maybe suggest that they go get some coffee or food. But an idea’s latched itself onto Keith’s brain, and he’s determined to see it through first.

“Hey,” Keith says, and he watches Shiro perk up. “You said you never went to prom, right?”

“That’s right,” Shiro affirms, and Keith can feel his gaze as he steps back from Shiro. He sticks his right hand out and hopes the gesture looks a lot more smooth than it feels.

“The music’s still going,” Keith offers. “If you want to dance.”

Shiro stares at Keith’s hand for a few seconds, and Keith tries not to let on that the wait is eating at him. Around them, Lance whistles and Slav’s waving goodbye to some of the teachers. A few minutes ago, Keith had seen Matt in the tech booth, and has no doubt that he’s watching the two of them like a hawk. After a few seconds of no reaction, Keith’s about to clench his hand and drop it down to his side as he laughs it off, but a large warm palm slides against his, interlocking their fingers together.

“Technically this is a semi-formal,” Shiro says as they draw close. He slides his hand around Shiro’s waist, resting his hand appropriately on the middle of his back. “But I do appreciate the thought.”

Keith finds himself rolling his eyes at this, but suddenly he’s in close proximity with Shiro and he has to pour all his concentration into keeping it together. He’s glad that the colour of the light across the dance floor has enough pink in it to disguise any time his face starts to heat up. Hopefully.

“I have two left feet though,” Keith warns as they start to move. “And I haven’t danced with anyone since my actual prom.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Shiro says, and the corners of his mouth tip up into a smile. “I’ll lead.”

Keith doesn’t recognize the song that’s blaring through the speakers, but Shiro does in fact do an excellent job of slowly turning them around on the floor to it. The music is too saccharine for Keith’s tastes, but he’s hard pressed to care as he focuses on how the space in between them slowly starts to disappear.

He’s not one for dancing at all, but Keith’s enjoying himself immensely. This has by far been the best idea Keith’s ever had, something that’s reaffirmed when Shiro twirls him out before drawing him back in. Keith stumbles with it, and that draws a good-natured laugh from Shiro.

“I can feel Matt and Lance watching,” Shiro mutters, and Keith makes an undignified sound at that. “They’ve been finding this whole thing very amusing.”

“What?” Keith asks, squeezing Shiro’s hand. He can hear Slav’s voice in the distance, and it might be directed towards them, but he doesn’t really care. The students are gone. “The fact that you thought that I was married and with child?”

Shiro blushes visibly at that, and Keith would find it endearing if it didn’t send a small frisson of panic through him. If he can see Shiro blush, Shiro can probably see the heat that’s settled around Keith’s neck, his ears, and high on his cheeks. Keith tries to swallow as much infatuation down as possible and remain in the moment.

“Amongst other things,” Shiro says cryptically, and yes that’s most definitely Slav in the distance asking someone if they’re leftover students. Using up his one good deed of the year, Lance tells Slav to go home and that he and Matt will lock up. Keith accidentally steps down on Shiro’s foot hard and jumps back a little, letting go of Shiro’s hand. Reflexively, Shiro grabs Keith’s wrist.

“Sorry,” Keith says, letting Shiro lead him back into his space. “Clumsy dancer.”

“It’s fine,” Shiro replies, and they don’t interlock hands again. Instead, Shiro slides his hand down the span of Keith’s forearm and tucks it under his elbow, sliding it around Keith’s waist. Keith loops his other arm around Shiro and like this, they’re closer than they had been before. They sway slowly as one song melts into another, and Shiro looks at Keith with an intent that he can’t ignore.

“I-” Keith starts, the same time as Shiro starts to say something as well.

“You go first,” Shiro says and Keith shakes his head.

“You go first,” Keith insists, and Shiro looks like he’s about to make Keith goes first but Keith bites his bottom lip and raises his eyebrows, signalling that he’s definitely not talking first. Shiro’s gaze lingers at his mouth for a moment before Shiro sighs through his nose and gives Keith another one of those quiet but dazzling grins. Shiro looks like a heartbreaker, and Keith’s thankful to whatever put him in this very moment and place.

“I’m glad you’re not Romelle’s dad,” Shiro says, and Keith gives him a confused look. That’s definitely not what Keith thought Shiro was leading up to. “Conflict of interest, probably.”

Ah.

Keith will take that.

“Conflict of interest?” he asks anyways, and Shiro nods. “I need you to elaborate, Mr.Shirogane.”

At any rate, Keith’s glad he’s not the only one going hot around the neck. Shiro looks like he’s in the process of picking out his words carefully, and if Keith was a braver man, he’d tell Shiro that he doesn’t need to because the answer is going to be an emphatic yes regardless.

“I uh,” Shiro starts, and Keith has to restrain himself from giving an encouraging look because he heard those tend to terrify more than hearten people. “I like you. And if you’d let me, I’d like to take you out on a date.”

It’s the best question anyone’s ever asked Keith. It’s also kind of overwhelming, coming from someone as stunningly sweet and hot as Shiro and Keith’s nervous that if he lets go of him, he’ll wake up in his bed or with his head slumped against the dining table, puddle of drool forming on the wood. Keith thinks he’s currently experiencing every positive emotion on the human spectrum all at once.

And of course, all that can come out is a terrible joke.

“Is this not a date?” Keith deadpans, and Shiro laughs. It’s rich and warm and coarse all at once, and Keith lets the sound of it sink in. He feels Shiro rub a small circle into his lower back with his thumb, and it’s hard not to sigh at it.

“You want our first date to be at a highschool dance?” Shiro asks, and this time it’s Keith that snorts. He tightens his arms around Shiro and Shiro pulls him in even closer.

There wasn’t a lot of space between them to begin with, but now there’s none and Keith has to tip his head back to properly look at Shiro. There’s a loud _whoop_ behind them and momentarily, Keith wishes for a life where everyone around him wasn’t incredibly nosy. He knows deep down though, that it’s an empty wish.

“Yeah,” Keith replies. “‘Cus then I can collect on a first kiss, right?”

Shiro looks surprised for a second, mouth forming into a small ‘o’. Keith gives him a hopeful look that he prays isn’t veering into desperation and they’re still dancing, spinning slowly against the floor. Keith doesn’t know how smooth that had come out, but Shiro hasn’t spluttered or let go of him yet so he’s going to be optimistic about it.

And he’s right for once, because the shape of Shiro’s mouth changes, breaking out into the widest smile Keith’s seen yet. Keith pounces instantly, leaning up to kiss Shiro’s grin. It’s brief and sweet and tastes like fruit punch and when Keith pulls back, Shiro’s smile has softened. His dark eyes twinkle, and Keith licks his lips.

Before Keith can unload any other lines on him, because he’s clearly on the ball tonight, Shiro leans down and sweeps Keith up into another kiss, one that’s a lot less tentative. Shiro is firm against him, and Keith allows himself to slide his hands up Shiro’s back.

His heart thuds in his throat, and Keith can’t believe that he’s lucky enough to be in this moment. It’s easy to quickly forget where they are, and the world narrows down rapidly to just the two of them. Shiro moves his mouth against Keith’s in a way that has Keith’s knees going weak and has him clinging onto Shiro’s sweater. Shiro’s hand slides to Keith’s hip and squeezes, like he’s just as eager to hold onto Keith.

It’s not long before Keith feels the swipe of a tongue over his lower lip, and he doesn’t think before he opens up for Shiro. They’ve stopped dancing altogether now, holding on to each other in the middle of the floor. He can taste the sugar from the punch and it’s a reminder that they’re somewhere where he can’t get too eager, no matter how much he wants to.

“Hey!” a voice calls out from behind them and they startle, Keith cursing softly as they break apart. “Are you guys done? Matt and I wanna go home.”

The soft pink and purples have been turned off, and the hall is flooded with the house lights. Shiro’s definitely pink under the warm yellow light, and Keith knows his face is equally burning. Shiro looks down at him with overly-bright eyes and Keith can’t help it.

He reaches up to peck Shiro on the lips once, twice, three times before Shiro’s hand has slid up his back and is pressing against his shoulder-blades, scooping him up into another kiss. Keith can hear a “ _gross_ ” from behind him but he doesn’t care, because it’s proving to be hard to get enough of Shiro.

“Keith,” Shiro murmurs in between the kisses and Keith makes a non-committal noise, focused completely on the feel of Shiro against him. “Keith, hold on.”

“What?” Keith lets go grudgingly, but Shiro keeps him close. “It’s okay, Lance thinks anything to do with me is gross.”

“They need to go home,” Shiro says. “But if you’re free, I can take you out on a proper first date right now.”

“Moving fast, huh?” Keith says, and it’s Shiro’s turn to roll his eyes at him. “Yeah, sure. I had no plans anyways. One of my clients cancelled today anyways.”

“Yeah?” Shiro says, finally letting go of Keith. “Who was it?”

“Dunno,” Keith grins. “Said he had to go to supervise some lame school dance though.”

“Glad that wasn’t me,” Shiro says flatly, and Keith starts to step backwards towards one of the side doors. It’s further away from where they’ve parked, but if Keith goes into a hall with empty rooms instead of out into fresh air, he might get a little reckless.

Keith can see a visibly relieved look on Matt’s face, even though he’s all the way up in the booth and he waves cheerfully at him. Keith knows that he and Lance are going to try and take all the credit for finally pushing the two of them together at the end, might even try to lord it over them a couple of times.

He doesn’t really care though, because he’s feeling so giddy right now that the feelings threatening to overflow. Keith can’t stop grinning like an idiot.

Shiro takes no time in catching up with Keith, twining his fingers through his own. Keith lets him, sticks his tongue out at Lance who waves him off with a middle finger and gives one last salute in the direction of the tech booth before Shiro pulls him out into the cool, open night.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading this guys!! I hope you enjoyed reading this silly thing as much as I enjoyed writing it :^) 
> 
> come hang out with me on my [blogē](http://phaltu.tumblr.com) or on my [tweeter](https://twitter.com/tagteamme) or on my [ fort of pillows that i have not yet figured out how to work](https://pillowfort.io/phaltu)


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